NIGHTINGALE
Marina Kemp

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

Copyright © Marina Kemp 2020

Cover design by Anna Morrison

Cover image © Alamy/Pierre Bonnard, The Garden 1935

Marina Kemp asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008326463

Ebook Edition © February 2020 ISBN: 9780008326487

Version: 2019-12-16

Dedication

For Lalu

Epigraph

‘I shall not hear the nightingale

Sing on, as if in pain’

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI,

‘When I Am Dead, My Dearest’

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

II

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

III

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

IV

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

I

1

She dreamt of nothing. She woke to the shuddering of train doors, catching only a glimpse of the stark platform and pale white sky before realising this was her stop. As she hurried from the seat, clutching her bags, she had to pull on a strap that had become caught on a rung of the luggage rack. She reached the doors as they were already closing, with a hiss like a punctured tyre. She had to tug her body through them, through their insistence as they clamped around her.

There was no one on the platform except for a woman in a florid skirt and long brown coat, the waxed coat of a farmer. She squinted at Marguerite. She stared for some time at Marguerite’s trainers, and then looked back down the platform as if for someone else.

Marguerite dropped her bags and knelt down to take a jacket out of her hold-all. The air was bitter, no warmer than it had been in Paris at seven o’clock that morning, in spite of how much further south she had come. When she stood up to put her jacket on, the woman was standing closer. She squinted again.

‘Mademoiselle Demers?’

‘Yes, that’s me,’ said Marguerite. The woman raised her eyebrows, not reaching out her hand.

‘I’m Brigitte Brochon, Monsieur Lanvier’s gardienne. We spoke on the phone.’

‘That’s right.’ Both arms through her jacket sleeves, Marguerite reached to shake the woman’s hand. It was given warily. ‘Thank you for coming to collect me.’

Madame Brochon shrugged. ‘It’s my job.’ She turned, starting to move towards the squat station building and the fields beyond. ‘The car’s this way.’

Marguerite picked up her bags and followed.

They drove to the house in silence. When they arrived, Madame Brochon took Marguerite straight inside and through to the old man’s bedroom, allowing her time neither to take in her new surroundings nor unload her luggage from the car. The handover was wordless on his part; Madame Brochon stood by his bed as she spoke, sturdy ankles placed wide apart.

‘Jérôme, this is Marguerite,’ she said.

‘Though most people call me Margo,’ said Marguerite tentatively, unacknowledged.

‘Rossignol may be a grand house but it needn’t faze her; she’ll soon know her way around. I’ve left instructions for where all the important things are kept.’

When he opened his mouth as if to object, she swooped straight in. ‘The last nurse’s notes are all there too so she knows which pills to bring you, and when, and what time you wake and all that. She’s got Doctor Meyer’s details and she knows where I am if she has any questions. I’ve left my number in the kitchen’ – though this was all previously unsaid, all news to Marguerite – ‘and I’ve told her that it’s best to contact me in the morning, early, before Henri and I start out at the farm.’

After the second sentence he had turned to the wall, and started to enact a sort of exercise with his eyelids: drooping them slowly, opening them wide, drooping again, widening them completely and then shutting them tight. The apparently immoveable Madame Brochon twisted her skirt in her fingers, shifted her considerable weight from left leg to right.

When she resumed her speech it was to the accompaniment of his reedy whistle, tuneless and insistent. ‘She should get on fine, there’s everything needed in the pantry for at least the next few days, and I’m sure she’ll not object to the simple things I’ve put there. They may not be anything fancy but I’m sure she’ll find the quality can’t be faulted.’

This last comment was, as throughout her speech, directed at the old man in the bed and not Marguerite. And so as Marguerite watched Madame Brochon, Madame Brochon watched the old man and the old man watched the wall.

Total silence took hold of the place from the moment Madame Brochon left. For the first few days, Marguerite barely exchanged a word with Jérôme, taking his silence as her cue. He didn’t ask her where she was from, about her background or past experience or suitability for the job. The house was some way from the village, down a forest-lined road that seemed to lead nowhere else. It was many days before Marguerite heard a car pass by, and when it receded the silence came rushing back to fill its space.

She started to explore the house slowly, expanding her radius just a little each day. The floor was stone throughout, and she trod carefully – she didn’t like to make much noise. Her own footsteps sounded somehow like an intrusion.

The old man’s room was on the ground floor, not far from the kitchen. At first Marguerite spent most of her time in the kitchen, cleaning out cupboards and sitting in an armchair for perhaps hours at a time, staring out into the garden, waiting for him to summon her. As she started to learn the rhythm of his needs, she could afford to spend time exploring the many other rooms. She cleaned them, one by one, taking time to wipe away the blankets of dust over the sinks, the crisp shells of long-dead daddy-long-legs and centipedes in doorways.

He didn’t sleep well at night, but often during the day. Marguerite, by nature active but prone to sudden, consuming bouts of somnolence, profited from his naps. Her afternoons often passed by in dull and dreamless slumber, from which depths she would emerge only with great mental and physical effort.

She soon learnt to take these long sleeps early, so that the struggle to come back to the world, to her room’s bare walls and sparse furniture, was over in time to face the darkness – when it started to descend – with full strength and clarity. She realised quickly that she was afraid of the nights here, in this house that was never visited by anyone, that it was her charge to protect. The dark was as thick and complete as sleep.

When Jérôme called out or knocked hard on the wooden headboard, sounds that often startled her through the silence, she would go in with a glass of milk or water. At night, he’d stare into the darkness outside the windows before she drew the curtains shut. He might say, ‘Totally black, completely and utterly black,’ as if to himself; or, ‘You wouldn’t be able to see the devil if he were standing right outside,’ tapping his chin with one of his surprisingly beautiful, fine-boned fingers.

On one of those evenings she dropped the tray after placing a glass and small dish of pills by his bed. Its clattering on the stone floor was a shock to the quiet, and he inhaled quickly, gripping the sheets. When the clatter and its echo died he smacked her arm, pushed the glass aside so roughly that it almost fell too, and turned to face the wall.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said and he swiped the air without turning, gesturing for her to leave.

He began to speak more, emerging in bursts from his muteness to chide her for taking too long to respond to his calls, or to demand medication, or ask with suspicion what she would be making for dinner. Madame Brochon’s provisions hadn’t lasted long, and Marguerite took to walking to the village two or three times a week to collect post, fresh milk, medical supplies and – once he had started to talk – the odd request Jérôme might have for something unusual: pistachios, some batteries for his torch, a bag of blackberries.

The route from Rossignol was winding, the quiet road fringed for the most part by forest. Twice, she’d seen a startled deer sprint through the trees. She imagined wild boar and badgers rustling around in the undergrowth too: she knew they must be around here somewhere, since something was digging up great pits on Jérôme’s land. What were they digging for? She wanted to know these things, but there was no one to ask. She was unacquainted with the details of rural life: the names of trees, which birds had which call, whether the large oak at the bottom of the garden was dying. Familiar only with the countryside’s boredom and silence, she was determined in this job to get to know her landscape, to become self-sufficient.

The people of Saint-Sulpice were not rude, but certainly no one was friendly. Just as it was not an ugly village, but by no means picturesque. It was like the last place she had worked: too close to a town to be remote, too far to borrow any of its buzz. With the same disregard for the old and quaint that she had noticed throughout provincial France, dilapidated old buildings – in fact lovely in their faded hues of rust and lemon – had been spruced up with brazen, teak-bright trellises, garish with orange and purple flowers. A café that might, in Paris, have embraced the tattered charm it would have earned after several decades of service, was here the victim of ruthless stripping, whitewashing and primping. It was filled with the ubiquitous red and white checker of country tabletops; a flock of wooden ducks lined up in polite procession along the windowsills.

She didn’t see Madame Brochon on her trips into the village, but there was many a Brochon-like matron. The grande dame of the boulangerie refused, even after Marguerite’s seventh or eighth visit, to register recognition; she pursed her lips when Marguerite ordered her bread, as if tolerating a young child. But Marguerite had learnt in these places that it was a dangerous thing to look for hostility where perhaps there was mere indifference. She knew it was a trick of the lonely to favour the rude to the simply unmoved; that the loneliest thing in these villages and in this most tucked-away of professions was to elicit no response at all.

She visited the library in her third week. Jérôme had asked for a book to be read to him each night. She had just dried him after an evening bath, the time when he was at his most spitting.

‘Can you even read?’ he had hissed after bathtime’s habitual and adamant silence, punctured only by grunts of indignation and occasional discomfort. Her hands were by his ankle; she was trying to guide one bony foot through the gash of a pyjama leg. His feet were growing soft under her auspices. She rubbed them after every bath with oil, sensed the relief this gave him not in any active words of encouragement but in the absence of the contrary.

‘Yes,’ she said simply. One foot was through; she started on the other.

‘Well, I should think it would do you some good to do some reading,’ he said, wincing theatrically as she pulled the waistline of the pyjamas in one swift motion up to his knees. ‘Careful!’ he snarled. She inhaled, waited for him to speak again. There was silence. She pulled the soft flannel trousers past his knees – swollen bulbs where stray, sparse hairs stood upright among clusters of moles.

‘I should not mind,’ he continued, looking resolutely at the ceiling as she pulled the trousers up past the shrunken bud of his penis, his soft, felt-like balls, the static fuzz of his white pubic hair, ‘if you would find something to read. Before I sleep.’

She tied the trousers’ drawstring in a gentle bow at his waist, smoothed the flannel shirt down over his belly. It was distended, hard as a drum. He flinched and flapped his hands.

‘All right, all right,’ he said. ‘Stop fussing.’ She stood and he put his hands on her arms and gave her his weight – considerable, in spite of his boniness – as she swung him gently onto his back, lowering him down onto the clean bedsheets.

‘Is there anything in particular you’d like me to read?’ she asked.

He frowned furiously. ‘It’s not for my sake, it’s for yours. Pick something you can read, only make sure it isn’t some ghastly romance. And I don’t want poetry. I want something with a real story, something noble. I used to enjoy the classics: Dumas, Hugo, Gaston Leroux. Albert Cohen, even. Just for God’s sake no romance or girly tripe.’ Then he added, ‘Whatever you think you could benefit from.’

And so she found herself two days later in the municipal library. It was as she had imagined, both dim and too bright. The librarian, young and sallow, stamped her books carefully and listed the rules of the place in a flat voice.

‘Returns must be made before twelve weeks have elapsed. Extensions can be made only by direct request in person and at the discretion of the librarian on duty. Care must always be taken to keep both food and liquids away from all books issued by this library, and in case of damage you should be prepared to pay a fine of up to twenty-five euros.’ Once he had reeled the rules off, he looked a little embarrassed. He secured his glasses, which had not slipped, with one finger, smiling faintly. His nails were chewed right down to the quick, a metro-map of veins across his hand.

‘I hope you’ll enjoy the three volumes,’ he said, turning to disappear back into the solemn darkness of his little booth.

Throughout his monologue, Marguerite had been conscious of being watched, and as she turned to leave she caught the eye of the woman sitting at a table close by. She wore a dark green hijab; her chin was raised imperiously. She didn’t drop her gaze. As Marguerite walked past to leave, she said: ‘And you are from …?’

‘Sorry?’

‘I haven’t seen you before. Where are you from?’

Marguerite paused. ‘I’m working here,’ she said.

‘Working where?’

‘In Saint-Sulpice.’

The woman narrowed her eyes, contemplating her. Then she smiled, a little wryly. ‘You’re Jérôme Lanvier’s new nurse, am I right?’

‘Yes.’

‘I could tell instantly. You’re from Paris?’

‘Yes.’

‘I knew that accent. Well, you must find it rather different here.’

‘Not so different from other places I’ve worked.’

The woman reached a hand out to shake Marguerite’s; she had long nails painted a dark, shiny aubergine. ‘I’m Suki. Very good to meet you. How do you like Rossignol?’

‘It’s comfortable.’

‘And Lanvier himself?’

‘Fine.’

‘That’s good. And your name …?’

‘Marguerite.’

‘Well, as I said, it’s good to meet you.’ She smiled again. ‘Enjoy your books, Marguerite.’

When she left the library, Marguerite stood for a moment to study the noticeboard on the wall outside, to delay the long walk home. A sign for a missing cat, a pamphlet listing a course of dance classes for the previous June, and a notice advertising a babysitter, with the phone number printed several times for people to tear off. Only two had been torn.

‘“What, no wine?” said Dantès, turning pale, and looking alternately at the hollow cheeks of the old man and the empty cupboards. “What, no wine? Have you wanted money, father?”

‘“I want nothing now I have you,” said the old man.’

‘Tired,’ Jérôme said loudly, with a croak as if he had not spoken for days. ‘Enough.’

‘Are you sure?’ Marguerite let the pages fall back, with her finger as a marker. He closed his eyes tight instead of answering. She had been enjoying reading; she hadn’t used her voice so much for almost a month. ‘Can I get you anything? Are you feeling comfortable?’ His response, as so often, was simply to screw his eyes tighter shut.

She rose and took the book he’d chosen from her selection to the table: a 1970s edition of The Count of Monte Cristo, its faded jacket showing a large full moon, shivering on the dark surface of water. She folded the corner of their page to mark it and felt a twinge of guilt for doing so; she thought of the librarian and his long list of rules, from which the prohibition of dog-earing a page had surely only been omitted on account of its sheer obviousness. ‘Flagrant disregard for the item’s longevity …’ she imagined him saying, and smiled to herself.

Turning to leave the room, she saw that the old man was watching her. He was lying flat on his back, a rigid straight line down the bed, his eyes swivelled to stare at her.

‘Don’t you laugh at me,’ he barked.

‘Sir, I—’

‘I will not tolerate it.’

‘But I didn’t—’

‘Just get out, now!’ He shut his eyes. ‘I can send you away the minute I don’t want you. Just one phone call and you’re out of here, scuttling back to whichever deplorable little hole you came from.’

She felt her cheeks colour; she took a deep breath.

Gradually, she became aware of a whirring in the room: a moth, throwing its body again and again at the ceiling lamp.

The old man was lying stiff and straight in the bed, his fists and eyes and everything clenched.

She watched him for a moment but he didn’t speak again and she left the room, walked straight out of the kitchen into the garden, into the blanket darkness. She breathed in deeply, felt the thud of her heartbeat gradually slow. There was a lightness in the air in spite of the cold; she could believe for the first time that spring was here.

She had never had a garden. Her childhood had been spent in an apartment on the fourth floor in the 16th arrondissement – large, with high ceilings and rich, heavy curtains. There was a balcony that they had been allowed to step out onto only under supervision from her mother or the au pair; it looked down over a wide, dappled avenue lined with trees. There was always someone walking a dog – she and her sister would think up names for the dogs they came to recognise.

She didn’t like to think of that. The garden here was hers and she wanted to make it grow. She would grow herbs, plant flowers. She would sit in the shade in the narrow olive groves and look over at her herb garden and pluck rosemary to put in little pots around the house. It would be her project.

And then when it was dark – this heavy, enveloping blackness – it would comfort her to think of her plants outside. They could line the house like ramparts.

The vegetables here were huge and beautiful. She had discovered the village market that morning, by chance, and bought red, yellow, brown and green tomatoes, their skins plump. The stall owner had said the green were the tastiest. She ate one as soon as she got home, bent over the sink. Its skin burst under her teeth.

There was a head of curly-leafed lettuce. It was so large, and had splayed open so generously, that she could have worn it on her own head like a bonnet. She washed it slowly, watched with pleasure the water turn black with mud. On a hook she hung a straw plait of garlic, its heads indecently bulbous. They shed veined paper over the kitchen surface.

She would make poule au pot for Jérôme’s dinner. Infirmity had made his appetite weak, but his eating habits carried the shadow of a once-greedy man: in spite of himself, his eyes widened when she brought in a plate of something he liked. He would gobble fast, with relish. She thought of him as she stood there surrounded by her vegetables, carefully unsheathing spring onions and slicing celery and scattering peppercorns. The chicken still held many of its feathers, which she plucked one by one, with care, thinking of Jérôme’s delicate white flesh.

She had started to doze, sitting in her chair in the kitchen as the stock bubbled, when the sound of a car in the driveway startled her. A door slammed, footsteps ground on gravel. No one visited the house; without thinking, she rushed to lock the door.

But it was Suki’s face that appeared at the window. She was dressed in a deep, violent magenta, out of place against the silver-greys and greens outside.

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ she said, smiling as Marguerite let her in. ‘I’ve caught you off guard.’ She studied Marguerite’s face for a moment. ‘You’ve been asleep.’

‘No, just – thinking,’ she said, rubbing her face.

‘Something smells nice.’ Suki walked past her into the kitchen, approached the cooker and peered into the casserole. ‘Poule au Pot?’

‘Yes.’

‘Lovely.’ She turned and leant back against the kitchen worktop, smiling, as if she had been there hundreds of times. Marguerite didn’t know what to say. She wanted her quiet kitchen back.

‘Can I get you something – a glass of water?’

‘Oh, please don’t trouble yourself. Actually, I can’t stay long.’ She took a pack of cigarettes out of her bag, and turned to light one on the gas hob. ‘I was just passing, and thought I’d come to say hello and see how you’re getting on.’

No one passed by the house.

‘I’m fine.’

She thought of the cigarette smoke floating through into Jérôme’s room.

Suki cocked her head to one side. Her expression wasn’t quite friendly, as if it held a challenge.

‘Yes? Well, anyway, I thought I’d say hello. And I thought, you’re an outsider, I’m an outsider.’ She gesticulated vaguely.

‘Are you new to the village?’

‘Not any more, though I often think I may as well be. I’ve been here – oh, a long time now. But I’m not from around here originally. Guess where I’m from?’

Marguerite sat down. She didn’t want conversation, didn’t want Jérôme to be woken by the noise; she wanted to go up to her room and crawl into bed and go back to sleep. And she hated guessing games, the ennui she felt when she contemplated their boundlessness.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Guess!’

‘Pakistan?’

‘Well, no – Iran. But the right continent, at least. You must be the only person who hasn’t guessed Algerian or Tunisian. Everyone just presumes I’m maghrébine. Maghrébine! Shit …’ She rolled her eyes, exhaling a long plume of smoke. ‘Oh, can I smoke in here?’

But she was stubbing it out already, in the sink.

‘I have to go, I was just dropping by. But you must visit me. I live right next to the doctor’s surgery.’

‘I can’t really leave Jérôme.’

‘What, you never go into the village? Not even to the library?’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Next time, drop by for a coffee. Not before noon, I never wake up before noon.’ She walked to the door. ‘Goodbye …?’

‘Marguerite.’

‘That’s right. Goodbye, Marguerite.’

She expected to find him asleep when she went into his room to get the book. It was the hour after his lunch; after eating, he almost always fell asleep immediately, as suddenly as a child pretending, his mouth mordantly slack. But today he was lying with the sheets right up to his chin and his eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. She thought that his look was one of deep fear.

‘Don’t you know how to knock?’ he snapped.

‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you. I—’

‘You what?’

‘I thought you’d be asleep.’

‘I see. And so you just wanted to skulk in here and watch me sleeping?’

‘Of course not.’

‘What did you want then?’

‘I wanted to take the book for a few hours.’

‘And do what?’

‘Read it.’

‘Without me?’

‘We’d still go back to where we left off.’

‘But then you’d be reading those passages twice?’

‘Well—’

‘Do you think you’re humouring me? Is that what you think you’re doing?’

‘Of course not.’ She braced herself for his next question but he looked suddenly weary.

‘I’m having some pain.’

‘Where?’

‘Everywhere.’

‘I can’t give you more Tramadol.’

‘Dolophine.’

‘I can’t give you that either.’ He groaned. ‘Let me give you a massage.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I’m not.’

He opened one eye, looked at her warily and closed it again. There was silence, and then: ‘All right.’

She approached the bed, pulled the sheet down gently from his chin to his stomach and rubbed her hands together to warm them. Then she pressed his shoulders down, firmly. She didn’t rub his skin, she pressed it: his shoulders, his slipped pectorals, the large crown of his thorax. She hummed quietly as she worked.

‘Your hands are cold,’ he mumbled, his eyes still closed. And then, ‘You’re always humming.’

‘Does it annoy you?’

He didn’t answer for a while. She moved her hands to his head, pushed and pressed each side slowly and heavily.

And then, so quietly she could barely hear it, he said: ‘No. Not really.’

She lifted his thin left arm, wrapped it in the blood-pressure cuff.

‘And?’ he asked when it released.

‘Fine today. In fact, a little lower than usual. Perhaps you’re relaxed from the massage.’

‘Hmmm,’ he said. And then, meticulously casual, he said: ‘You’re Parisian, of course.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did you leave Paris?’

She sighed as she removed the cuff, the tear of the Velcro the only other sound in the room. ‘Why not? It’s very beautiful here.’

‘But boring. Very boring. Why would you leave Paris to come here? At your age? On your own?’

‘Because I wanted to.’

‘But why?’

‘Why not? This is my job. I came here to work. The position came up, so I applied.’

‘But you didn’t have to work here.’

‘No. I can work where I like.’

‘So why did you choose here?’

‘Why not here?’

‘Why not Paris?’

‘Because I did,’ she snapped. The words came out too loud and too fast. His eyes widened, his shoulders gathered. He watched her intently and she pretended not to notice his gaze, busying herself by going through the drug chart she’d left at the end of the bed. She made a few notes, put the pen in her pocket, made to leave the room.

‘I won’t ask again,’ he said, as she reached the doorway.

She turned around. ‘You can ask me whatever you want.’

‘Oh, I’m not sure about that.’ He closed his eyes, smiling just a little as she turned back around to leave. ‘Not sure at all about that.’

2

Henri liked this time of the day the most, when his manual work was largely done and he could afford to slow down a little, to sit on the ground with his back against a fence or wall, feel the scratch of dried grass through his trousers. He could close his eyes and enjoy the thinning of the day’s warmth. His hairline was encrusted with sweat; he could rub it, and bits of dirt, and desiccated grass, and what he imagined to be his own refined body salt would fly as if startled into the still twilight air.

The dirt, all of the dirt, was a source of pleasure to him. Meticulous and clean by instinct, he nonetheless enjoyed the day’s long accumulation of filth before he headed back to the house on weary legs to take his bath. He dragged the pre-bath moment out as long as possible to build up its eventual release; he would stop at the basin in the kitchen and drink almost an entire beer, usually his only beer of the day, in virtually one go.

Then he climbed slowly into the bathtub that was really too small for his long limbs and he crouched there, only then turning on the taps. He watched the water reach the top of his foot, water that was already swirling brown with dried mud. It reached his ankles, it lifted his large, slack penis. When it reached the base of his back, he started to get to work; he scratched out the dirt embedded behind his nails, scrubbed his long back and torso until they were pink. Then he emptied the bath, rinsed it out, and started again – as many times as it took for the water to be quite clear, long past when it ran hot.

This evening’s bath was particularly welcome; today had been hot work. Spring was well underway, the sun swiftly gathering intensity. Henri imagined vaguely the great star’s rotation, its heat slowly spreading over Earth, from the Sahara to the Maghreb, over the sea, soaking through the Mediterranean mile by fish-filled mile, reaching the French coast and moving, an inverted shadow, towards the resilient, winter-bitten land around his farm. He had always envisaged it this way, as long as he could remember.

But the bath held a further charm today: the metallic gurgling of the tap, the clunks and creaks the running water set going through the walls of the house, the lightly hissing hum of the rising water level all worked together to drown out the women’s voices downstairs. This was one of each week’s two or three unannounced visits from Laure, the village boulangère and Brigitte’s confidante. Returning from the fields this evening, he had caught the small woman’s nasal voice just in time to avoid entering the house through the kitchen. That meant no long draught of water, no beer, but it was worth it.

‘Henri’s bath routine,’ he imagined Brigitte saying to Laure in the kitchen below, as she so often did among their friends; ‘Henri’s e-lab-o-rate bath routine.’ She tended to give special emphasis to words over three syllables long. ‘There are families without water in India and Africa and here is our Henri, using enough water each day to fill an aquarium!’

But she also took pride, he knew, in his appearance. When they married, both straight out of school, no one could believe that Handsome Henri – the village’s nomenclature, of course, not his own – had chosen Brigitte Arnoult. Plain Brigitte, big Brigitte, dumb Brigitte. Because that was the other thing: Henri was first in the class, always had been. ‘A way with words and a head for numbers,’ his mother had always said, a regular refrain in the Brochon household as he grew up.

Their courtship and engagement had unfolded quickly. As he leant back in the bath he closed his eyes, imagined his younger self, tall and handsome with his hair combed tidily back, knocking on the Arnoults’ door every evening. Every day was the same: he would bow to enter the house through its diminutive doorframe and greet Brigitte’s parents, sit down and find his bride-to-be sitting nervously in the gloom. He couldn’t imagine now what it was they had found to talk about, sitting each evening in her parents’ warm salon, drinking milk from her father’s cows. Her parents were mistrustful; it was as if he were playing some sly trick.

His own mother had been the first to voice in his presence the question on everyone’s lips: ‘Henri, for God’s sake, why Brigitte?’ He hadn’t felt cross, or slighted; he had understood her consternation. It’s not as if he somehow saw beauty in Brigitte’s scant charms – how could he? When he spoke to the girl her face and neck came out in livid purplish patches, she could not meet his eye. He had not failed to notice the great width of her feet, nor the fair but not insubstantial whiskers around the corners of her lips. But there were things about Brigitte that appealed to him that he couldn’t explain to his mother, who was so tidily and precisely her opposite.

At eighteen, he chose Brigitte because he liked the silence and reverence she reserved for him, she who was otherwise the loudest and most domineering of girls. He liked her simple way of speaking, her literal reading of everything, her lack of coquetry.

With Brigitte he had sensed refuge, a life left unscrutinised and undisclosed. And hearing her flat, loud voice now rise and fall below the din of the pipes and the water, he had to acknowledge that he had that. In spite of the small-minded prurience with which she had grown to view the rest of the world, despite her endlessly repetitive chiding, he still lived in a home devoid of judgment or enquiry.

He heard one of Laure’s whinnying laughs and turned the tap on more fully to drown it out. He leant back against the tub, his legs bent at their extreme right angle in the bath that was too small. He closed his eyes again and rubbed his hands over them, down his cheeks to his mouth; he could taste his salt. Letting his mind drift away from Brigitte, away from Laure, he ran his hands slowly down his body.

Brigitte cracked an egg into a bowl and tilted it to show Laure. ‘Do you see the colour of that yolk?’

‘There’s nothing like your eggs, I always say that.’

‘That is the yellowest yolk you can find.’

‘You’ve considered selling your eggs properly, haven’t you? You’d put the Bernards right out of pocket.’

‘We’ve got enough on our plate with the dairy and the sheep, we just don’t have the scale. Not that you’re wrong, of course. You know I’m not one to brag, Laure, but they really do make the very best omelettes. You can tell from an omelette alone how fresh your eggs are.’ She continued to crack a further three. ‘The secret to a really excellent quiche lorraine is whisking the eggs as long as you can. Whisk them to hell and gone.’

Laure nodded and Brigitte started to whisk with a force she liked to think was almost alarming. ‘So Jérôme’s latest girl was in the shop again today,’ Laure said, ‘buying Lanvier’s usuals. A baguette and a loaf aux céréales to help things get going downstairs …’ She poked her stomach.

‘Laure, you’re disgusting,’ chided Brigitte, though she loved a good bowel joke as much as the next woman. ‘I’m surprised she hasn’t been chased away yet, to be perfectly honest.’

‘Well apparently not. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t last much longer. She doesn’t look like she’s cut out for the job.’

‘Don’t I know it.’ Brigitte wiped her hands on her apron and settled her bottom on the edge of a stool. Her ankles ached; she rolled them from side to side. ‘She needs a good meal and a stint on the farm. That would sort her out in no time at all.’

‘Perhaps I’ll throw in a few brioches with her next order – she could do with the extra butter.’

‘Do that, then send her my way. I’ll show her how we work over here. There’s no room for airs and graces when you’re having to clear out Vanille’s latest blockage.’

Vanille, their eldest cow, had to be ‘rectally excavated’ – as Henri put it – on a regular basis.

‘Forget Vanille’s blockages – you’d frighten her away with your egg-whisking alone, Brigitte.’

‘You bet I would,’ Brigitte cried, brandishing the whisk as if to hit Laure with it. She felt a little egg run down her forearm, and wiped it on her stomach.

‘I heard she received a visit from our local mystic.’

Brigitte looked up. ‘Not Lacourse?’

‘None other.’

‘I told you how that woman used to turn her eyes at Henri?’

‘I could never forget it,’ said Laure, who had been there at the time of that great scandal, some fifteen years ago. Nothing had actually happened, but Brigitte had never forgotten Suki’s repeated visits to the farm, the stubbed cigarette ends she found in a little pile outside the house, the swish of exotic colours and jangling of metal in her kitchen, and the woman’s wretched laugh, false as anything.

‘Well let’s hope she doesn’t get Jérôme’s nurse under her wing.’

She poured cream and milk into the bowl.

‘Look at that cream,’ said Laure.

‘Mind you, his nurse won’t have time for new friendships. Jérôme’s getting worse and worse. He can’t move himself any more.’

‘And still no sign of his boys?’

‘None. They were in touch to give me the bare details of this replacement when the last nurse couldn’t hack it any more, and that’s the last I’ve heard from them. Not that I’m surprised. I did tell them a few months back now that he wasn’t doing too well and they’d be well advised to come and see him at some point, but they weren’t having any of it. They were rather rude, if I’m honest. Told me to get on with my job, and that I was the gardienne and not their therapist.’

‘I remember. Shockingly rude.’

‘I said to Jean-Christophe on the phone – you remember, the youngest – I said, “He is your father, you know,” and he told me it was none of my business and that, as I say, I wasn’t his therapist.’ She let the whisk rest for a moment and wiped her forehead. ‘And he’s a lawyer! All that education, and still so rude.’

‘Well, I’m not surprised really – I suppose he takes after Jérôme. They’ve always thought they’re too good for Saint-Sulpice.’

‘Oh, they were such wild boys, don’t you remember?’

‘How could I not!’ said Laure.

‘Still, it’s dreadfully sad. Their father at death’s door and they won’t even come and see him.’

A rare silence fell between them. Brigitte stirred bacon into her mixture, and Laure leant over to inspect it. ‘Your pigs?’

‘That’s right.’

They heard water gurgle in the bathroom upstairs; Brigitte rolled her eyes and sighed. She thought again about the nurse: she must go and check in on her and Jérôme. She’d reminded Brigitte of a doll she was given by her uncle as a young girl, which had broken too quickly. She’d been washing its hair and the head just came clean off, with a pop.

This was surely a particularly beautiful evening. As he dried himself, he looked out at his land through the bathroom window. The view was so familiar that he seldom noticed it – no more than the small portrait of Brigitte’s mother hanging in the dark corner at the top of the stairs, or the cup above the sink that held their toothbrushes. But today he couldn’t help but see: everything was a dark gold, the sun falling but still far from gone, and he could see his herdsman Paul with Thierry, the latest farmhand, still working on the perennially crumbling walls of the olive groves. In this light, only at this point of the day, the silver of the olive leaves was a dark grey – just as only in the searing heat of summer could they appear quite white. The sky was clear and insects whirred and his lone goat let out a shout like a deep hiccup.

He strode over to the window, tucking the towel neatly around his waist, and called out: ‘What are you two doing still at work?’

Paul and Thierry looked up immediately, scanning the garden, the porch, trying to find the source of the shout. They were smiling in anticipation. He waved and leant out, feeling with some satisfaction the breadth of his shoulders fill the slim window frame. ‘Over here!’

They frowned against the falling light, holding their hands up over their eyes.

‘We’re just too damn hard-working!’

‘We can’t get enough!’

Henri laughed theatrically. ‘Oh, you can’t fool me!’ They laughed too and turned back to the wall with some awkwardness, as if uncertain whether the dialogue had ended. He turned too, and his hollow guffawing echoed in his ears, foolish. As he combed his hair in the mirror above the sink he sighed deeply, and his face looked very tired and dull to him then.

‘I thought perhaps we could go out today.’

Jérôme turned to look at her, saying nothing.

‘It’s getting warm,’ she said. ‘I thought it might do you good to go outside.’

He continued to stare, wearily. Then he turned in bed to face the wall. Marguerite waited for a while, but he remained silent.

‘Would you like to?’

‘I haven’t been outside for over a month.’

‘Yes, for at least five weeks,’ she said. ‘Since before I arrived.’

‘You probably expect I don’t keep time, just lying here day in day out.’

‘No.’

‘But I do keep time. I know how long you’ve been here, I know what day it is. I’m not a prisoner.’ He forced out a little laugh. ‘I’m not Dantès, raging around his cell with whole years passing by.’

‘Of course you’re not.’

‘I employ you. You’re not here out of charity.’

‘Sir—’

‘So don’t you think if I wanted to go outside I would have told you to take me out? Or do I strike you as too meek to ask for what I want?’

‘No.’

‘Perhaps you think I feel like an inconvenience to you.’

Marguerite took a deep breath, waited.

‘I suppose you think you’re on some mission to rescue a feeble old man from terrible suffering and loneliness.’ He turned then in bed, excited. He raised himself up on one elbow. ‘I suppose you’re living in your own little fairy tale. Our own little Parisian Mother Teresa comes to the countryside to care for a very sad old man who will be eternally grateful.’ A fleck of spit had collected at the corner of his mouth. ‘Perhaps they’ll strike up a wonderfully redemptive friendship and she’ll forget all about the shameful life she’s running away from and all the people who have rejected her from the day she was born until the day she scurried along to this poor old house. And then the sad little old man will die smiling in her arms, tears twinkling in his eyes.’ He licked his lips and stared. ‘Isn’t that right?’

‘No.’ Marguerite started to tidy the few belongings on the table. She could feel the whump of her heartbeat; her hands were shaking. ‘I was just wondering if you wanted to go outside. I am just doing my job.’ She slammed one of the many jars of vitamins down a little too hard. ‘I know from your last nurse’s handover notes – which, by the way, were entirely perfunctory – that it does you good to get out, and that Doctor Meyer recommends it.’

‘Oh, perfunctory!’ he cried. ‘What terribly impressive vocabulary you have, Mother Teresa. Bravo. It must have been that sparkling education you got yourself at nursing school.’ She closed her eyes, and he turned back to face the wall. In a low, exhausted voice, he said: ‘Now get out please.’

She whispered the words ‘fuck you’ as she left the room. She walked straight through the kitchen and out into the garden. Now she spoke aloud. ‘Fuck you.’ She inhaled deeply, stretched her arms above her head, felt her abdomen pulled from pelvis to ribs. ‘Fuck off and die already,’ she said, and was surprised to be overcome suddenly with laughter. She bent over to enjoy the sensation, resting her hands on her knees. She felt her hair falling around her face as she laughed. Then she straightened up and rubbed away tears from her eyes.

‘I wonder what you’ll think, Henri, when you see him. He’s gone rapidly downhill.’ Brigitte shook her head as she spoke. ‘It’s very sad.’

‘I wasn’t thinking I’d go into the house.’

‘Weren’t you? No, I suppose not.’

‘I haven’t been in for some time.’

‘No, not since – well, I don’t know when. Didn’t you have to fix his bed that time a few months ago?’

‘No, we sent Thierry to do it.’

‘That’s right.’ They had almost reached the village; Brigitte leant forward in her seat to inspect everything. ‘That roundabout is getting grubbier by the day.’

‘Hm,’ said Henri.

‘It’s really a disgrace, actually. I know the weather’s only just warming up, but there’s no excuse not to have something planted there. Remember when I planted those hydrangeas in the middle?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Well, those lasted a while at least. But I can’t be expected to come to the rescue every time something in the village needs fixing … Huh, what a surprise – I can see Fred in the Tabac, already on his second beer of the day, no doubt.’ She sniffed, was silent for a moment. ‘Laure was saying this new nurse was seen talking to Suki Lacourse,’ she said as they passed the Lacourses’ house, and she eyed Henri carefully.

‘Is that right?’ He checked the rear-view mirror, indicated to turn right out of the village.

‘Well, apparently so. I wonder what someone like that thinks she’s doing chatting up some young little nurse.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Look at the state of that tarmac,’ she said, peering out at the battered road leading to Rossignol. ‘Well, it seems odd to me. Since she thinks she’s such an intellectual.’

‘Perhaps the nurse is an intellectual too,’ he joked lightly; Brigitte snorted.

‘I should think not! She hardly seemed capable of stringing two sentences together.’

‘Oh dear. Not great company for Jérôme.’

Brigitte was silent for a moment. ‘Mind you, you don’t have to be an intellectual to be intelligent.’

‘No,’ said Henri, and he laid his hand over hers. ‘Of course you don’t.’

Henri pulled the truck into Jérôme’s driveway. Rossignol was tired: the once-proud arch stretching high above the gates was covered in rust, the grey paint it used to wear peeling in small patches like sunburnt skin.

‘Wait here for a moment,’ said Brigitte. ‘I’ll just check they’re both around and awake. If I don’t come out in a few minutes, you can presume they are, of course. And pick me up on your way home?’

Henri turned in the driveway and stopped by the tall cypress tree in its centre. It had always been there, as far as he knew. As a boy and young man he had come here often to play with Jérôme’s sons: Marc, Thibault, little Jean-Christophe with his ears like large mushrooms. Henri and his friends would race here from the village on bikes, small stones and flint spraying under their wheels.

He remembered going on expeditions with Thibault, his classmate; they would tie bandanas around their foreheads and take large, pronged skewers into the wild forest around the Lanviers’ land. ‘We’re hunting boar!’ they’d shout to Thibault’s brothers, refusing to take Jean-Christophe with them despite his pleading. ‘You’re not big enough yet JC. They might kill you.’

Rossignol had been larger, and grander, and more remote than anyone else’s house. When they were teenagers, the surrounding forest was a good place to smoke cigarettes and weed, and get drunk. There was a pool in the garden, long since out of use, into which they’d jump from what felt like lethal distances, hurling themselves in at their most acrobatic angles and dunking each other a little too long.

Yet always hanging over this idyll was the shadow of Jérôme. His sons were terrified of him, even the impossibly grown-up-seeming Marc, whom the whole village seemed to worship. Henri remembered Jérôme coming out to the pool sometimes, in his Speedos, and all the boys falling silent.

‘A race?’ he’d challenge them. ‘Who’s man enough for that?’

He’d smile, look around, accept his reluctant contestants. Though not tall, he seemed to the young boys preternaturally strong and fit. And he was, indeed, a faster swimmer – by a breath – than Henri, who was the fastest of them all.

He liked Henri; Henri sensed he approved of him. And so Henri, feeling a little disloyal, liked him back.

‘My father’s a fucking cunt,’ Thibault said once, kicking a wall, fists curled tight by his side and tears in his eyes. Henri felt he could neither agree nor disagree, and said something non-committal; perhaps ‘all parents are’. But Thibault had insisted: ‘No, you have no idea. My dad’s a proper cunt.’ Then he’d stared accusingly at Henri. ‘You don’t think so because he likes you. You’re exactly what he wishes I was.’ And Henri had had to lie.

Brigitte hadn’t come out. Henri turned on the engine and made to drive the truck back out onto the road, but he stopped at the sight of a figure standing by the gateway, squinting at him. It was the new nurse, he realised, though he had thought her a teenage boy at first glance. She was younger than he’d imagined, standing long-limbed and straight in plain, even scruffy clothes, her eyes narrowed as she stared at him in the bright sunshine.

He started to wind down the window to introduce himself, but she was already walking swiftly towards the house, keeping a distance from his truck. As she turned the corner of the house to get to the back door, she was the eerie vision of a teenage Thibault.

3

She stood for some time inspecting all the pastries behind the glass. There were glossy chocolate and coffee éclairs, vile-coloured marzipan pigs and frogs that she and her sister used to long for as children. The millefeuilles were impressive, delicately layered and squidgy. There were dark jam tarts, criss-crossed with glistening strands of pastry. It all made her feel a little sick.

She pointed at a pile of fougasses.

‘Are they plain?’ she asked the young woman at the till.

‘Yes.’

‘No, Julie,’ interjected the main boulangère, tutting as she looked up from her magazine. She had been reading it standing up, leaning forward onto the counter. Like a hen, thought Marguerite, with her small head, short cropped hair and unusually wide hips. And she blinked a lot, and stared, and jerked her little face just like a chicken. ‘That’s the garlic and rosemary.’

She watched Marguerite as she paid. Marguerite could feel her small bright eyes on her back as she left, pulling up the hood of her cagoule against the rain.

She thought vaguely of going to sit in the library, for something to do, and realised that she was startlingly bored. She couldn’t sit anywhere to eat because everything was wet, so she stood under the awning outside one of the closed shops. It appeared to sell pet accessories, exclusively: there were leopard-print dog and cat beds, pink and red and blue collars studded with shiny paw prints. She turned back to the road, the tarmac black with rain. The fougasse tasted good. Small crumbs of pastry scattered down her front.

She felt, as always in this village, that she was being observed, though there was hardly anyone around in this weather. And then she heard a whistle. She looked towards it and saw Suki dressed all in black, standing in the doorway of the grand house on the corner, her shoulders a little hunched in the cold. She was beckoning to Marguerite, who could do nothing but cross the street and join her.

‘What are you doing out here?’ Suki said instead of greeting her. She pushed the door open. ‘Come in, come in.’

Inside, the house was dark. Suki led her through a gloomy hallway to the salon, switching on table lamps and standing lights. There were strings of coloured bulbs across the old mantelpiece.

‘Sit down,’ she said, gesturing towards the sofa. ‘Will you have tea?’

‘I really can’t stay.’

‘Of course you can.’ She walked out of the room, and Marguerite heard her opening and closing cupboards. ‘Do you like Persian tea?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

The salon was a mess. There were heavy, faded curtains in the same mushroom velvet as the sofa and armchairs. Magazines were piled in columns on either side of the fireplace; there were cardboard boxes around the place filled to bursting, with various words scrawled on them: HOME VIDEOS, PHOTOS MISC., JOURNALS. There were at least eight lamps in a bizarre array of styles: ornate silver antiques, brightly coloured ceramics, a plain beige sphere that could have cost five euros from Auchan. The bookshelves were crammed with cheap-looking paperbacks and chaotic rows of figurines.

‘I’m sure you’re thinking, What a mess,’ Suki said as she walked in. Deftly, she kicked magazines off the coffee table to clear a space for the silver tray she was carrying. There was a bowl filled with sugar cubes, a teapot and two matching glasses. The set was exquisitely decorated: dark blue and gold, with tiny pink roses. ‘Persian tea is the best in the world. But I’m sure you know that.’

She sat down in the armchair opposite Marguerite, tucking her feet beneath her. She lit a cigarette, exhaled. ‘So, you never came to visit me,’ she said.

‘Sorry – I’ve been so busy with Jérôme.’

‘No apologies,’ she said, raising her hands. ‘You’re under no obligation.’ She looked around the room. ‘A little different from Rossignol, hm?’

‘Yes.’

‘I can’t live without clutter. It must be in my blood or something. It drives Philippe insane.’

‘Is that your husband?’ asked Marguerite.

‘The one and only.’ Suki stood to pluck a photo frame from the mantelpiece, which she handed to Marguerite. She started to pour the tea, all the time balancing her cigarette between two immaculate fingers, its long train of ash undisturbed.

The photograph showed a younger Suki grinning up at a plain, bored-looking man in a suit.

‘He looks – nice,’ said Marguerite.

‘Fat,’ Suki said immediately. ‘He’s so damn fat now. That was taken when he was still young and handsome.’ She smiled, finally flicking ash into a little dish. ‘Drink your tea.’

Marguerite took a sip.

‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ Suki said. ‘Of course, the water should be heated in a samovar. That’s the traditional way. But now tell me how you’re liking your new job. Or is it new? You’ve been here some time, I suppose.’

‘Almost six weeks.’

‘Six weeks! What do you do all day? Aren’t you bored?’

‘No – it’s very busy.’

‘I suppose that’s a good thing. Keeping busy. Well, six weeks isn’t long enough to get really, truly sick of the place. I moved here in ’84. So what’s that, eighteen years now? I’m no use at maths. All I know is that it’s been a long time.’

‘Where did you live before?’

‘Marseille. Tehran, then Hilversum in the Netherlands, then Marseille. So I was used to life in a big city. I’m like you, I’m a city girl by nature. I’m not made for all this.’ She gestured at the window behind her and grimaced. ‘How old do you think I am?’

‘Oh, I never get this question right.’

‘Guess!’ she insisted. ‘I won’t be offended.’ She lifted her chin, turned her face a little.

‘Twenty-nine,’ said Marguerite, lying.

‘Thirty-eight!’ she cried. ‘People are always tricked by my skin, I don’t have any wrinkles. Even though I smoke like a chimney, I’ve got not a single wrinkle. It’s genetic.’ She leant forward for Marguerite to inspect her face, pulled with one finger at the skin around her eyes. Her eyeballs were a little pink. ‘See?’

There were lines, of course, but it was true that her skin was smooth. It seemed polished. Marguerite leant back so Suki didn’t inspect hers.

‘Anyway, so I married Philippe when I was twenty and came to this little dump. He was very rich, and handsome – you’ve seen the photo – and I thought I was going to have a terribly romantic life in the countryside. Instead, I sit here all day whilst he works in a technology park. A technology park!’ She smiled, looking down at her hands. Her nails were the palest pink, immaculately painted. ‘It’s not quite the glamorous set-up I had imagined, as you can see.’

‘Well, look at my set-up,’ said Marguerite. ‘I’m aware it’s not what most people would choose.’

Suki lit another cigarette. ‘And no doubt Jérôme treats you like absolute crap,’ she said.

‘No, he’s fine.’

‘Okay, I know what you’re like. You’re not going to admit it. Very professional. But everyone knows that he’s a tyrant.’ She topped up their glasses. ‘Just a little more,’ she said. ‘And I suppose you’ve met the gardienne? Brigitte?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘And?’ She looked sharply at Marguerite. ‘All your evil spinster great-aunts rolled into one, right?’

‘Well …’ She paused. ‘She’s quite stern.’

Then she thought of the woman’s visit two days before and felt freshly irritated. Brigitte had walked around the ground floor, inspecting how clean it was. She had peered at the food in the fridge and cupboards, enquired into Jérôme’s diet, asked questions about his medication that were nothing to do with her.

‘Actually, she’s terrible,’ she said, and Suki threw her head back and laughed.

‘Still waters run deep,’ she cried. ‘I knew you couldn’t be as sweet as you seem. You’re right, of course. She is terrible. She can’t stand the sight of me. In fact, she can’t stand the sight of any good-looking female – that’s probably why she’s nasty to you.’

‘I really doubt that.’

‘Stop being modest. Look at you! So young. What are you? Twenty-five?’

‘Twenty-four.’

‘And look at your little waist!’ She reached forward as if to pinch Marguerite’s waist, but Marguerite wrapped her arms around herself. ‘Are you naturally slim or do you diet?’

‘I really can’t stay,’ she said.

‘Won’t you wait for the rain to stop?’

‘I really can’t, I have to cook Jérôme’s dinner. It’s getting late.’

‘Don’t be silly. I’ll give you a tour of the house.’

She stood up and took Marguerite’s glass from her hands, putting it down on the table. Then she took one of her hands – her own were smooth, warm from holding the glass – and started to take her through to the kitchen.

Marguerite resisted, pulling her hand out of Suki’s grip.

‘Please, I would love to see it next time. But Jérôme will wake up and he might be in pain. I have to be there.’

Suki pursed her lips and cocked her head to one side. Then she smiled. ‘Okay then,’ she said. ‘But make sure next time is soon.’

Marguerite was glad to get out of the heat and gloom. In the sullen white light and rain, her stomach uncomfortably full of pastry and tea, she walked home at her briskest pace, almost a jog. The forest on either side of her dripped and crackled like fire.

She could hear Jérôme as soon as she opened the back door, banging repeatedly on his headboard. She dropped her wet jacket and ran through to his room, the stench of shit hitting her before she entered. It was formidable, a wall of smell.

She breathed hard through her mouth as she took him in her arms and raised him up onto his feet. He was wailing quietly, his mouth puckered.

‘Let’s get you to the bathroom.’

‘Where were you?’ he cried as they shuffled towards the door.

‘Getting food from the village.’

‘I don’t understand it, I just woke up and it had happened.’

‘It can happen to anyone.’ She lowered him onto the bidet, removed his pyjama bottoms and was hit afresh by the stench, its unmistakable acrid sweetness. She tried not to look as she folded them roughly, flinging them into the sink. She wiped and cleaned him in the bidet, something he could usually do himself. But he was limp, leaning forwards onto her, his face between her shoulder and neck. His head was very heavy.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said again.

‘Don’t worry. These things happen.’

He was silent, letting her take his full weight. When she had cleaned him, she pushed him back gently so that he leant against the wall.

‘Are you feeling all right? Can you sit like this while I get you clean pyjamas?’

He didn’t answer. He sat there with his mouth drawn down, staring at the floor.

She took away the soiled pyjamas, threw them in the battered, ancient washing machine in the utility room. The smell still hung everywhere. When she went back into the bathroom, he would not look at her.

‘Would you like a bath?’ He nodded slowly. He sat there, naked from the waist down, knees knocked together, hands in his lap as if to cover himself. She wrapped a towel around his shoulders and pulled him up to stand again, very gently, so that he could sit more comfortably on the disintegrating wicker chair in the corner of the room.

‘Strong,’ he whispered.

‘I’m sorry?’

He paused. ‘I said you’re strong, for a girl.’

She smiled. ‘Yes, I suppose.’

She turned the taps on at full force. She fetched vanilla essence from the kitchen and dropped it into the rising water. When the tub was full, she helped him in, folding a towel under his head as he rested back.

‘I’ll be right next door, making dinner. Just call if you need anything.’

He was silent for a moment, but as she left the room he cleared his throat. ‘I suppose the sun is starting to set.’

She stopped. ‘Yes.’

‘It will get dark soon enough.’ He crossed his arms in the water, looked down at his hands. ‘Dark, dark, dark.’

‘Perhaps I could stay for a short while,’ she said, ‘and read some of our book.’

He lifted his chin, pursed his lips and gazed at his toes at the end of the bath. ‘Well, all right. If that’s what you’d like to do.’

That night, in one of her nightmares, she found a small black runt of a kitten with milky eyes; she held it in both hands, wrapped in a blanket. It shivered all over, its little chest bouncing with each heartbeat. She had to find it somewhere to sleep and regain its strength before it was too late, but she couldn’t find anywhere safe for them. There were other cats, strong cats, prowling around the barn they were hiding in.

Then she realised that the blanket was smeared with shit; it was all over the kitten too, its fur slick with it. It had collected in the delicate apertures of its ears and around its muzzle. The kitten opened its tiny mouth wide and Marguerite wiped frantically to stop the faeces seeping in.

Disorientated on waking, it was her sister’s shit-caked trousers she thought of, not Jérôme’s. Until she could wake herself properly and push her memories away, she was cleaning her sister’s small thighs and bottom; it was Cassandre’s hot head hanging dully on her shoulder, Cassandre’s hot arms wrapped around her neck.

She held her pillow to her, squeezing it as tight as she could. ‘Cassandre, Cassandre, Cassandre,’ she said, over and over, an incantation to keep her safe, as she had done so many times in the quiet of the night.

She spent the morning cooking. It was still raining, though it had abated a little. She had no urge to go anywhere. Jérôme had slept particularly badly, calling her down repeatedly to attend to him. The intervals of sleep she snatched felt febrile, and she woke every time he knocked, or every time a nightmare built to its climax, covered in cold sweat. It collected in a pool between her breasts; her back and shoulders were wet to touch.

He had not eaten his breakfast, and had fallen into a deep sleep after she took the untouched tray away. She had a dull and protracted conversation on the phone with the village doctor, going through Jérôme’s repeat prescriptions. When she had finished she went through to the kitchen and prepared a dish she’d learnt as a teenager from their au pair: chicken in a creamy sauce with rice, a sort of English poule au riz. She and Cassandre had always loved it, its delicious blandness. Then she made a tart, the lemons stinging her cuticles where they had grown rough and ragged.

There was a low fog; the rain pattered continually, punctuated by the odd torrent coming down from where it collected in the tiles above. She wondered whether the entire roof was made up of Jérôme’s tiles, since that had been his business. When she’d met his adult son for her interview, in his glistening office in Paris, he had called the family business, which had gone back for generations until Jérôme sold it, a ‘tile empire’. She smiled faintly at the thought of Jérôme as the Tile Emperor. She imagined him standing in a factory amidst piles of tiles, wearing a braided jacket with epaulettes and a gleaming black bicorn on his head. Then she remembered his feeble form in the bath as she’d read to him the night before, and stopped smiling.

She’d opened a bottle of wine to make the sauce, one of five bottles she’d found in one of the cupboards, capped in dust. Now, looking out at the greyness outside, she poured a glass for herself, and the glug the wine made brought her back to some vague memory she couldn’t place, an indefinable levity. She sat in her chair and held the glass to her nose, inhaling the earthy, foresty smell. She tried to imagine for a moment that she was in Paris. The pattering of the rain helped to hide the countryside’s absence of traffic, voices, sirens. She tried to imagine she was sitting alone in a café where no one knew her and she had nowhere to be.

‘What am I doing?’ she muttered, and then felt self-conscious, as if she were acting. A plump robin landed on the window ledge and looked in, its head cocked. I’m here, she thought, not in Paris. There’s nothing there for me. She took a long sip of wine. This is what I wanted.

She woke up to sounds in the garden. She had a headache and a stale taste in her mouth. Quickly, she got up from the armchair she had been curled up in, and as she stood all the blood in her body seemed to rush, pounding, to collect in her right temple. Pressing one cool palm against it, she heard the clinking sounds again, and a male voice. She looked around, still disorientated, and snatched up the wine bottle and glass, putting them away in a cupboard. Then she went to the door, trying to see through the drizzle and gloom.

There were two young men outside with a wheelbarrow and spades, a few large sacks of manure or earth standing beside them. They were buttoned up against the rain, hooded cagoules fastened to let only their faces show. She locked the door and let her forehead rest against the cool glass; it soothed her head.

Then another man came around the corner from the drive, and they were face-to-face through the glass. Startled, Marguerite stepped back. He jerked his head back a little, as if startled too. He wasn’t wearing his hood up, like the other two; even through the glass, and with a metre or so between them, she could see the tiny glass-like bubbles of rain covering his face and hair.

He raised his hand and smiled, signalling an unspecific question – could she let him in, could she open the door, could she come outside? Hesitantly, she unlocked and pulled the door open, not all the way, and stood in the gap.

‘I’m sorry to come unannounced,’ he said. ‘Henri Brochon.’ He said his name as if she was supposed to know it, and held a hand out to shake hers. She took it, again with hesitation. It was warm and his grip firm; she looked down quickly at their hands together, hers pale yellow against his brown.

‘I’m Brigitte’s husband.’ He paused. ‘Brigitte, the gardienne.’

‘Yes, of course.’ She held her hand to her temple again to try to stop it throbbing. The pain was spreading behind her right eye. ‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t expecting anyone.’

‘No, I’m sorry – Brigitte said she would call you. She asked me to have a look at the oak at the bottom of the garden. She said it’s struggling.’

‘Yes.’ Marguerite tried desperately to think of something to say. ‘I thought it might be dying. Do you look after the garden here?’

‘No, I’m a farmer. But I can spare the boys for a few hours. Brigitte doesn’t have permission to employ a gardener for the Lanviers, but she’s responsible for keeping the place running so we do what we can.’

‘I see.’ She wondered when she had ever said ‘I see’ to anyone. She waited, and then it occurred to her that he was waiting for her to say something. ‘Did you want something?’ she said, and then, realising that might sound rude: ‘A glass of water? Or do the –’ She hesitated to call them ‘boys’. ‘Do they want some coffee?’

‘No, they’re fine. I’m going to leave them here for a bit, so let them know if you think of anything else that needs doing. Is everything working okay in the house?’ He looked over her shoulder into the kitchen.

‘Actually, there are a couple of things,’ she said, more to break the silence than because she wanted anything fixed. ‘I’ll let them know.’

‘I can have a quick look now,’ he said, stepping forward, but she didn’t move. ‘Shall I come in?’

‘Okay.’ She opened the door reluctantly, stepped back into the kitchen. She watched as he crouched down to remove his wet boots. He wore thick, ribbed green socks. They looked very clean and new for a farmer.

‘There’s a lamp I can’t work – here,’ she said, leading him to the standing lamp in the corner of the kitchen, by the chair she’d been sleeping in just a few minutes earlier. She eyed the rumpled blanket and indented cushions, hoping he wouldn’t notice. ‘I’ve changed the bulb, but I think the whole thing might be broken.’

He nodded. ‘Anything else?’

‘Well, I can only get two of the gas rings to work on the cooker.’

She didn’t want to tell him the other things now; they seemed insignificant and intimate. A broken chair in her bedroom that she didn’t need to sit on anyway; the wardrobe door that had come off its hinges and that she had just left resting against the wall instead.

‘Let me have a look at these then.’ He walked out of the kitchen, into the house, and she scanned the surfaces quickly, wondering how it looked. He came back with a toolbox she hadn’t known existed. He didn’t look at her but got straight to work on the gas rings and she waited there, unsure what to do. She couldn’t leave the kitchen, she couldn’t just sit there doing nothing. She switched the kettle on: an old, yellowed electric kettle like the one her au pair had brought from England.

‘Would you like coffee?’ she asked to his back.

‘I’m fine, thank you,’ he said, turning only briefly to speak. He bent over the cooker, fiddling with something. He was tall, his shoulders broad; the kitchen felt very small then. She turned and opened a cupboard, rearranging things that didn’t need arranging. The kettle’s foolish crackling and rumbling started to rise steadily towards boiling, the sound dominating the room. Henri removed his jacket, turning to hang it carefully over a chair. His sweater was also green, green like his eyes and his socks. She wondered if he matched them intentionally.

Finally, the kettle clicked and steam rose. She made a cup of tea she didn’t want.

‘I’ll be right back,’ she said, and left the room. She didn’t look in on Jérôme; if he was awake, she didn’t want to have to explain that there was someone in the house. She went to go upstairs but realised Henri might have to come and find her when he had finished, so instead she sat at the bottom of the stairs and blew into the cup. Steam met her face; she closed her eyes.

It was always strange to be back in the house; practically nothing had changed. Henri could remember countless breakfasts at this kitchen table, when he had stayed the night as a young boy. Madame Lanvier made elaborate breakfasts for her household of males, and she gave the boys coffee. Henri hadn’t liked the taste but had drunk it nonetheless because it made him feel mature. He would never have been allowed coffee at home, not at that age.

The kitchen was just as tidy now as it had always been under Madame Lanvier’s constant domestic surveillance. He couldn’t remember her without picturing her wiping surfaces or washing things. When he was very young, he had watched her hang the family’s washing on three lines in the olive groves. He remembered standing against the warm stones of the house, watching her bend heavily to take white sheets from the basket, standing to hang them, very slowly, smoothly, even rhythmically. When she had gone back to the house, he had run over and hidden between the walls of hanging sheets. He’d stood there in a cool, dazzlingly fragrant tunnel of white, until he heard Thibault calling him to some game or other.

His own home had been very dull by comparison. Without siblings, each room was his to enter; there was no friction, no chaos. His mother, adoring, intuitive, had few reprimands for the son she admired without reservation. His father, the best farmer for miles, was a largely silent presence. When Henri wasn’t studying, his father taught him, often wordlessly, how to set the cows up for milking, how to nurse suckling runts, how to lop the heads off chickens. The sound of animals and machinery, but little else, had suffused their home. How exotic, then, had Rossignol seemed: the three brothers always fighting or laughing, the great quantities of food consumed, the crude jokes, farts and burps. The chaos would be punctuated and compounded by Jérôme’s high-octane outbursts, his fist slamming against the table and doors banging closed after him. Amidst all this Céline Lanvier moved calmly with her slow, gentle force.

He put his tools down and tried the gas ring he’d just fixed; it hissed briefly and then burst into controlled blue flame. A beautiful, electric blue. He turned the gas off and took his tools over to the lamp to rewire the plug, a quick and easy job that most women he knew would have managed with ease.

When he was finished, he put the tools away and the nurse appeared, as if she had been waiting just outside.

‘It’s all done,’ he said, putting on his jacket and boots.

‘Thank you.’

‘Do let Brigitte know if anything else comes up. It’s our job to keep the place going. I’m sure you’re busy enough with your patient.’

‘Yes, of course.’

He waited for a moment, wondering if she would say anything else, but she simply looked back at him, very serious.

‘The boys will be here for a little while so if you think of anything else, just let them know.’

‘Thank you.’

She turned and started to busy herself taking tins out of a cupboard. Henri watched her for a moment, the muscles of her arms flickering under the skin as she moved. He let himself out.

He stood in the drizzle, watching Thierry and his younger brother, Rémy, working in the distance. He let his vision blur a little, trying to imagine they were the young men he had seen so many times here in the past. Marc Lanvier, Jean-Christophe, Thibault. But the Rossignol of his childhood was a place of sunshine and heat; he found it difficult to reconcile that with the grey scene in front of him.

‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours, okay?’ he called out, and they turned and called back, faces small in their hooded jackets. He walked back to the truck quickly, and thought about the nurse as he started the engine and drove out. The place was so cut off, Jérôme so difficult, and she so young. He couldn’t imagine what she was doing here.

‘Who was here?’

Marguerite placed a slice of the lemon tart by Jérôme’s bed, and he stared at it.

‘What’s that?’

‘Lemon tart.’

‘It looks vile.’

‘You don’t have to eat it.’

He picked at it with his fingers, tasted it with a laboured show of reluctance. ‘Who was here?’

‘When?’

‘You know when. I heard a man’s voice. I heard you talking to a man.’

She remained silent, took his free arm to take his blood pressure. She always enjoyed the puffing sound of the pump. It reminded her of blowing up balloons.

‘Well?’ he snapped.

‘Monsieur Brochon came here.’

‘Henri! He was in the house!’ Jérôme smiled, his mouth full of tart, and she watched him carefully. It was the first time she’d seen him look somewhere near happy, even fond. ‘A great man. Why didn’t you send him in?’

‘He didn’t ask.’

‘Well, that’s because he will have presumed I was resting. Next time, send him in. This is my house, you know.’

‘I know.’

He eyed her as he chewed. ‘Handsome man, Henri, isn’t he?’

She turned to put the cuff and pump away. ‘Your blood pressure’s a little high today,’ she said.

‘Isn’t he?’

‘I didn’t notice.’

‘You must have noticed.’

She took the empty plate from him, brushing crumbs of pastry from his belly onto it.

‘So the tart wasn’t quite so vile,’ she said and he scowled.

‘Disgusting,’ he said. ‘Far too sweet.’

She rolled her eyes as she walked out of the room.

‘Woman!’ he shouted after her, but she ignored him, entered the kitchen and ate a large slice of tart standing up by the counter. It was delicious.

4

Henri leant against the fence, watching Cédric as he examined Vanille. At eighteen, Vanille was his oldest cow and the only one to have a name. She had not been able to produce milk for many years, but Henri couldn’t let her go. ‘He loves that old thing more than me,’ Brigitte would often chide, which irritated him because his loyalty to Vanille felt more elemental than sentimental. It might sound ridiculous – he could guess perfectly well what Paul, or indeed anyone, would think if he knew – but she was the last link between the farm he had now and the farm he had inherited when his father retired. The place had done well under her vigil. It had mutated and expanded, a little colony of industry; Vanille and the house itself were the only things that remained the same.

And now she was ill – slothlike, heavy, sad. He looked at Cédric, trying to read his face. Henri had no instinct for sickness.

‘It’s not a blockage this time,’ Cédric said after a while. ‘I can’t find anything up there.’

The men stood in silence for a little while. Henri stepped towards Vanille, resting one hand on her head. She didn’t flinch, looking up at him blankly, her eyeballs marbled pink.

‘Probably just time she went on her way,’ Cédric said. Henri let go of her head, resting his palm under her muzzle for her to smell. ‘She’s what, fifteen by now?’

‘Eighteen.’ Henri looked into his friend’s eyes. They were still their old, deep blue, but Henri noticed his wrinkles now, how deeply they were scored. They had been two of the brightest boys at school; Henri could still remember clearly Cédric going off to Grenoble to study veterinary science, how glamorous that had seemed. ‘It couldn’t be urinary?’

‘Her piss ran normal.’

‘Ah.’

‘How many productive years did you get out of her?’

‘A lot. Ten, perhaps?’

Cédric whistled. ‘You’re lucky to get more than three these days.’ He laid his hand gently on Vanille’s back. ‘She’s done you proud.’

‘My girls are all right. They’re not a bad lot.’ Henri looked at the rest of the herd, grazing calmly, indifferent to the two men.

‘Well,’ Cédric said, packing up his things, ‘I’m afraid I can’t find anything. It might be cancer but let’s call it old age. At this point it’s the same thing really.’

Henri nodded. ‘Nothing we can do?’

‘I wouldn’t say so.’ The vet ran his hand again over the big knuckles of her spine and smiled gently. ‘They won’t get much meat off her.’

‘Oh, I won’t bother with all that.’ Henri stroked one of her ears; she stood there dumbly, not even grazing. He couldn’t send her away to die.

‘Are you staying out here?’ Cédric asked, and Henri nodded. ‘I’ll see myself out. Send my regards to Brigitte. I’ll see you soon.’

They shook hands and Cédric turned and started back towards the farmhouse. Henri watched him go, his figure dark against the pale morning. He turned to Vanille and stroked her muzzle again.

‘You pretty old thing,’ he said. Then he climbed over the gate; he had to get to work.

The air was warming already: it would be hot work today. The cicadas had started, he hadn’t noticed when. It was the same each year, their chorus insinuating its way into the fabric of the days without fuss or ceremony. Once it was there, it was difficult to imagine how silence sounded without it.

Henri turned back as he walked to look at Vanille; she was still watching him. She knew.

‘Good God,’ Jérôme said when she brought his breakfast. She had barely slept in the night, imagining sounds and the sly movement of human shapes against the black shadows of the trees outside her room. Jérôme was already sitting up in bed, a manoeuvre he managed with difficulty alone; unlike her, he appeared to have had an unusually good night, calling only once for pain relief. ‘You look like you’ve spent the night in a cave.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, and he laughed. The sound – a real laugh, not a harsh little bark for effect – was so surprising that she turned from arranging his medication to look at him. He was smiling, his eyes bright, a different creature altogether from the day before.

‘But you have slept well.’

‘Very well,’ he said, tugging at the sheets with a little excitement. ‘Like a baby.’

She watched him as he ate, the grinding cogs of his old jaw as he chewed. Sunlight poured through the window onto the foot of his bed. The wind had blown away the rain; the clouds dotting the sky outside were white and bilious.

‘Today, I’ll go outside,’ he said when he’d finished.

‘Fine,’ she said. She thought with weariness of the effort it would entail. ‘Of course.’

‘It looks like a good day.’

‘It’s pretty sunny,’ she said. ‘It might be a bit cold, but I’ll bring blankets.’

‘And it’ll do me good. As you say.’

‘Yes. We can go after your nap.’

‘Why wait?’ he said brightly. ‘Let’s go now.’

She brought his wheelchair into the room. It was old-fashioned, more like a grand piece of garden furniture than a wheelchair. She could imagine it carrying young wartime convalescents around country houses in England, or frail, wealthy women in resorts in Switzerland. Marguerite was accustomed to sitting patients up in their chairs for eight hours a day, or as long as their skin could take it; it was crucial to prevent pressure sores and the build-up of fluid in immobile chests. But Madame Brochon had dismissed her request for a modern chair – another thing for which she had apparently not been allocated expenses – and Marguerite relied on bed positioning and the armchair in the bedroom to keep Jérôme upright.

When she wheeled it into the room he scowled, his first unpleasant look of the day. ‘I don’t need that thing!’

Marguerite stopped. She felt drunk with exhaustion. ‘How else do I take you out?’

‘You help me walk, it’s no different to taking me to the bath or the lavatory. Take the armchair out instead, I’ll sit in that. I hate this contraption, I don’t need it.’

She lifted him from the bed and they shuffled together through the corridor, the utility room, the kitchen, stopping occasionally so that he could rest against a wall or surface and she could catch her breath. His arm around her neck made her stoop, the long bone of his forearm tight against her throat.

When they got out of the house, he stopped, looking up, breathing hard. The sunshine fell white on his face. They continued to shuffle together, until they reached two particularly old-looking olive trees.

‘Here,’ he said. She lowered him to sit on the edge of a terrace wall while she went back into the house to fetch the armchair in which she often dozed in the kitchen. She set it down between the two trees and lowered him into it, laid blankets over his lap and chest, asked if he needed a hat.

‘I want to feel the sun on my face,’ he said.

Marguerite was warm and breathless from exertion. It was still a little windy; the breeze cooled her skin and rustled the silver leaves of the olives. She laid another blanket over the ground by his chair and sat down.

‘This is where the washing used to hang,’ he said quietly. She looked at him; he looked calm, gazing at nothing.

‘Yes?’

He didn’t respond. She wondered what ghosts he was seeing right now. A woman, his children, his own younger self. Friends, visitors, maybe lovers. Then she let herself think of home for a moment. Frances, their English au pair, hanging washing in the large spare bedroom. Marguerite hanging a towel over the tops of two chairs so that she and Cassandre could sit under their own little roof; Frances singing funny-sounding songs to them in English, ‘Little Miss Muffet’, ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’ with its guttural heft. Marguerite and Cassandre playing escargot on their large balcony, taking care to wash the chalk off the ground before their mother came home. Hopping, marking their own squares with their initials, Marguerite always winning. MD, MD, MD, CD, MD.

She looked at Jérôme and wondered about his own painful memories. A man like him must have reams of them. She thought of the son who had interviewed her for the job: evasive, hasty, a little pleased with himself. That unique combination of infallible politeness and unidentifiable rudeness that she had come to recognise in nearly everyone with a privileged background, a background like her own.

He hadn’t made a secret of his dislike for his father, though he hadn’t openly mentioned it. He’d emphasised that the job wouldn’t be easy, that Jérôme had had many nurses leave and that they needed someone who would stick it out. He’d also emphasised that there would be no one else around, no one at all. Marguerite had wanted the silence then, though she was aware now that she had underestimated it. She’d also needed the money – the salary they were paying more than justified the fact that the job was 24/7, without respite.

And of course, crucially, it was far away from Paris. Her mother and father hadn’t tried to contact her when she’d been nursing in Picardy, but they had known she was there. Now – unless they made a little effort, which she doubted they would do – they’d be gratefully unaware that she was here in the Languedoc, surrounded by miles of rural silence, with a dying old man for company.

‘I have three sons, you know,’ Jérôme said, and Marguerite sat up; she felt eerily as if her thoughts had permeated his.

‘Yes, I know.’

‘I suppose you met the youngest, Jean-Christophe.’

‘Yes.’

‘The lawyer.’ He looked at her. ‘I’ll bet he could barely give you five minutes of his time? It’s a strange way to work, being paid by the minute. I’m not sure it can do anything except make you think your company is too valuable to share around.’

Marguerite nodded. She had often thought this about her own father.

‘And then I have two others. Marc and Thibault. Three sons and me, can you imagine what it was like when we all lived under one roof?’ He smiled wryly. ‘Poor Céline.’

‘Was Céline your wife?’

‘Yes.’

‘The only woman in a house full of boys.’

He shot her a glance, his softness dissolved. ‘Well, I’m sure it was fine. She had nothing to complain about, nothing at all.’ He looked at her again, checking for a response, and Marguerite nodded. ‘I gave her this house – you might not believe it now, but it was very grand. And I gave her everything she could ask for.’

‘I’m sure,’ Marguerite said.

‘Oh, she had nothing to complain about. You get all kinds of women – and men now, too – complaining, complaining, complaining. Giving a woman a great house, giving your kids skis and expensive bicycles and language tuition, that’s not enough. They’ll still find something to complain about.’ He shook his head, frowned. ‘But not Céline. She never complained, not once.’

Marguerite had cooled down a little; she pulled a blanket around her shoulders.

‘Are you warm enough?’ she asked.

Jérôme turned to look at her again. ‘If you ever get married,’ he said, ‘you’ll do well not to listen to any of the crap you pick up in magazines and on television. What men want is a woman with sense and patience. We might think we want the red racing car but we don’t really, not in the long run. We need an engine that will keep us going.’

‘That isn’t a very romantic metaphor.’

‘What do you know about metaphors?’ he snapped. ‘Or romance.’

‘I know plenty about both,’ she said, irritated, but her words sounded foolish as soon as she’d spoken them. A child trying to show her parents that she’s grown up. Jérôme merely grunted.

‘Really. Well, your literature teacher must have been terribly disappointed when you chose to become a carer.’

‘I’m a nurse.’

‘What a difference.’

Marguerite closed her eyes tight, breathed deeply to try to quieten the thudding in her chest. Then she opened them. ‘Was working in a tile shop intellectually demanding?’

Jérôme’s neck bulged as he turned to stare at her. His eyes were wide; an immediate colour had spread across his face. ‘Would you like to repeat that?’

‘No.’

‘I’m asking you to repeat it.’

‘I don’t think you misheard me.’

He blinked. ‘Have you forgotten that you’re working for me?’

‘No, I haven’t.’ She felt the insult of tears forming; she was too exhausted for confrontation. But she couldn’t face backing down. ‘That’s why I don’t think it’s right that you should insult me constantly.’

‘Well! I don’t think it’s right that you should answer back. Don’t forget, just one word from me and you’ll be gone, out of here.’

‘With pleasure,’ she said, very quietly.

‘What did you say?’

She didn’t answer and he watched her, intently, his shoulders up near his ears. She ignored the crawling of an insect on her neck, determined not to look away, and there was total silence between them as they stared. Then a magpie rattled and Jérôme broke his stare, let out a harsh little laugh. ‘You’re funny,’ he said. ‘You know I was just teasing you? You mustn’t let me get under your skin.’

‘I don’t.’

‘I was just having a joke.’

‘Okay.’

He was watching her again, eyes sharp above his smile.

‘And as I’m sure you know, I didn’t “work in a tile shop”. I owned an extremely profitable business.’

Marguerite didn’t reply; she shrugged the blanket from around her shoulders, warm again from the adrenaline. She felt the thud in her chest subside, slowly.

Jérôme laughed again, a laugh that didn’t seem wholly forced.

‘A tile shop,’ he repeated. ‘You’re very funny.’

The milking clusters detached from the cows’ udders and withdrew, clanking and swinging. Henri sanitised the cows’ teats, pink and engorged, thin lines of milk still trickling from them like the white sap from figs. He opened the gate for the cows to move slowly out, lowing and nodding as they walked, and then he called Thierry in from the yard to hose the parlour down. When the young man had taken over, Henri pulled off his thick rubber gloves and rinsed them. He would change out of his milky overalls before he saw to Vanille. He didn’t want to taunt her with the smell of her youth.

Back in the house, he changed into a fresh shirt and jeans and sat in the study to get some paperwork done. It wasn’t urgent, but he needed delay. He went through the accounts for perhaps fifteen minutes until he knew he could no longer put it off. Then he stood up, walked straight out of the house, taking his shotgun, glimpsing Brigitte through the kitchen door and ignoring her as she called out. He strode out to the pasture, where the cows had already settled back into grazing.

Thierry sat with the calves now, feeding them formula, and he looked up and then down at the gun. His head bobbed back slightly, like a tic, and he looked at Henri questioningly, with some alarm, opening his mouth to speak. Henri didn’t acknowledge him.

He held the gun behind his back as he approached Vanille, only now slowing his pace. She blinked.

‘Come on, my beautiful lady,’ he said. ‘Beautiful lady.’ He let her smell his hand, and she rubbed it. ‘Come on,’ he said more loudly, even tersely, so that Thierry might hear. Then he led her away, her awkward, rocking gait making him tread more slowly than he could bear. He needed to do it now, could already feel his resolve slipping. Now Thierry had seen him, he had to go through with it. He couldn’t turn around and wait until tomorrow.

She was docile, infinitely trusting; he got her with ease into the old stable nestled at the corner of the next field. Standing there beside her, he had to wipe tears from his eyes and cheeks.

‘You bloody fool. Get a grip.’

He kissed her head and took it in his hands, turning it so that she was facing out of the doorway, out to the fields. She stared out obediently, not turning even when he loaded the gun. Her cheeks sagged like old elastic; she nodded a little, reflexively. He cocked the gun, took the barrels to her head and pulled the trigger. She dropped in an instant, heavy as concrete. He didn’t look at the ground. A fine mist of warm blood settled over his face.

He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, pressed until it hurt. Then he wiped his face with his sleeves and strode from the pen, passing Thierry as he made for the house.

‘Call the knackerman to come and get rid of that,’ he said, gesturing behind him. He didn’t look at him, or the cows, or down at the blood he imagined must cover his body. He sensed a silent terror around him, suffusing the pre-twilight air. Everything was silent. Even the cicadas stopped suddenly, for just one second.

Brigitte set his dinner in front of him: lamb and potatoes, and a tall glass of water.

‘Busy day?’ she asked, but he didn’t respond. ‘I’ve finished the feed orders for the pigs and chickens. I found a new merchant, we’ll be saving a couple of hundred euros a year.’

‘That’s great,’ Henri said, getting up from the table to get another beer from the fridge. She watched him, glanced down at the bottle in his hand as he opened it. ‘Three beers isn’t very much, Brigitte.’

‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘Good.’ He sat down and took a long draught straight from the bottle. She didn’t like that but he knew she wouldn’t say anything. Ordinarily, she might tease him – ‘farmer by name, farmer by manners’ – but he knew that she knew not to do that tonight. He almost wanted her to try.

They sat in silence for a while as she started to eat. When Brigitte felt uncomfortable, she affected a daintiness as she ate that annoyed him. As if the bald eagerness of her darting fork could be mitigated by the small volume of food she picked up each time; or this rare show of delicacy, the repeated wipes of her napkin to each corner of her lips, make her appear less greedy.

‘How’s Paul’s shoulder?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know, he was in Montpellier today.’

‘Well I do hope he’s seen a physio.’ He could hear the moistness of her chewing. ‘I wonder how Thierry’s mother is.’

‘Why?’

‘Because she’s been ill.’

‘What, with a cold or something.’

‘Not a cold, Henri. She’s had scarlet fever.’

‘Scarlet fever?’ He leant back and let his chair tip backwards, which he knew she hated. ‘What is this, the nineteenth century?’

She frowned; she became embarrassed when he brought up any period of history she couldn’t remember from school. As far as he could tell, that left them with only the most superficial smattering of the Revolution to discuss with any ease.

‘Well that’s what it was,’ she said. ‘Laure says she’s been awfully ill. I did mean to go round there with some things but you know how busy it’s been these last few days.’

‘Why any busier than usual?’

Brigitte put down her fork and let out a little sigh. ‘I’ve been going through all the re-orders, Henri! It’s taken a long time. I’ve done them all, we’re up to date.’

Henri shrugged, took a mouthful of potato and washed it down with beer. He didn’t often drink more than one beer and he felt a little drunk already. He let his chair tip back again.

Brigitte took refuge in her food. ‘I’ll take her something tomorrow if I get a chance.’

‘I’m sure she’s fine. Maybe it’s a good thing; she might have lost a bit of weight at last.’

‘Henri!’ cried Brigitte immediately, and she looked hurt. Now he had a rise, he regretted his callousness. It was too easy.

‘That wasn’t kind,’ he said, trying to smile. ‘I take it back.’

‘I should jolly well think so,’ she said, and he was freshly irritated.

‘But it’s true. She’s grossly overweight.’ He stood up, pushing his plate away.

She stared, eyes wider than usual. ‘Won’t you eat?’ she asked.

‘I’m not hungry.’ Half-drunk bottle in his hand, he crossed the room.

‘Where are you going?’

‘For a drive,’ he said.

‘At this time? Whatever for?’

‘I feel like it.’

‘Henri!’ she cried again, and looked down, her lips pursed tight. ‘All right. Of course. Well, I’ll leave your food out, okay? I’ll wrap it up so Jojo doesn’t eat it. You can have it in a little bit. You must need it.’

‘Maybe.’

He walked to the truck, pushing aside Jojo as she tried to come with him. He could feel great walls of inevitability closing in on every side, almost tangible. He tried to resist for a moment, considered turning back towards the house. But then he imagined the night ahead of him, sitting downstairs until he knew Brigitte was asleep, crawling into their bed next to her slack snores. That was too dismal, and his hunger too deep.

It took twenty minutes to drive to Edgar’s – usually enough time for Henri to question his decision at least three times, but not tonight. As he drove, his third beer and the cool air rushing through the windows made his head light and calm. No more indecision, and no more rage.

He pulled up a little way down the track from Edgar’s cottage. The cottage itself was small, tucked away in woodland, and he was able to leave his truck away from the road. There were no cars in the driveway, no guests. Classical music blasted through the kitchen windows: opera, a man’s thick baritone, infinitely sad. Henri stood for a moment looking up at the sky, a few stars showing through gaps in the clouds. Then he shook his head and walked to the door and knocked.

Edgar smiled when he opened the door, his eyes only half open, lazy, seductive.

‘I’ve been wondering when you’d come,’ he said. He reached out for Henri’s waist; Henri tensed his abdominals under Edgar’s touch. They kissed. ‘Are you going to sit and keep me company for a while, or is this one of your hit and runs?’ he said into Henri’s ear. Henri groaned, pushing Edgar into the house. He felt sick, and aroused, and relieved.

He lay on the sofa while Edgar sat next to his head, running a hand through Henri’s hair. He remembered washing Vanille’s blood from it just a few hours earlier, how sticky it had been.

‘How’s farm life?’ Edgar asked.

‘Fine,’ said Henri. He didn’t want to talk. ‘How’s writing life?’

‘Wonderful. I’m eighty pages in and it’s flying along. But now you’ve shown up I’m naturally bound to get lovesick and stop being able to write anything but sonnets. And the world has enough of those.’

Henri turned his head sharply to remove Edgar’s hand. ‘Can you get me a drink?’

‘All the vices are coming out tonight,’ he said in the smiling voice Henri couldn’t stand. Edgar walked to the kitchen and Henri sat up, flattening his hair down, stroking it firmly into its usual parting. He stared at the coffee table in front of him, covered in books and used cups and glasses. He picked up the book at the top of the pile: Literary Impressionism in Conrad and Ford. He flicked through the pages, but could no longer make much sense of the bald, un-accented striations of English on each page. Nor could he remember what Conrad had written, whether he was English or American. His knowledge had receded like Edgar’s hairline, eroded under the great seasonal tide of the farming year.

But it was books that had first got them talking, ten or eleven or twelve years ago now, at drinks after a christening ceremony in the village. It was shortly after Edgar had moved there, and for the first hour or so Henri avoided this stranger everyone referred to as an ‘eccentric’. ‘Pretentious ass,’ he whispered to Brigitte when they were first introduced. But then over drinks they began talking, Edgar telling him offhand, as if Henri wouldn’t know the first thing about it, that he was attempting a biography of Molière. He had been visibly surprised when Henri reeled off lines of Le Malade imaginaire. They went on to discuss Racine, who’d been Henri’s favourite at school, and it was enlivening to summon his past knowledge, talk to someone who shared it, let their talk meander down unpractised routes. With everyone else, each conversation was simply a replay of the last.

As the afternoon went on – a violently hot afternoon in mid-August, just before a mistral came and swept summer’s intensity away – he felt Edgar’s eyes on him, interested and appraising, and felt himself stand taller, hold his jaw more firmly. He left the party reluctantly, to Brigitte’s bemusement, since he was usually the one to drag them away from social events. And he drove home drunk, tingling throughout his body, excited and fearful and alive.

Now he was sitting before a stack of books on modernist theory, the Molière project abandoned many years since. Edgar placed a bottle of Chablis and two empty glasses on the table.

‘Actually, I should go,’ he said, standing quickly to stop Edgar trying to hold him back.

‘Would it have been different if I’d brought a Sauvignon?’ Edgar asked with a smile, and Henri ignored him. In a drier tone he said, ‘And with that, Hurricane Henri sweeps off to other shores, oblivious to the wreckage he leaves in his wake.’

‘I left the dog in the car,’ he lied, and let Edgar kiss him. Then he left, walking as quickly as possible to the truck.

When he got back to the farm, the house was unlit except for the kitchen. He walked in and saw his uneaten dinner on the side, covered neatly in cling film, with a little note beside it in Brigitte’s young-looking hand: ‘Enjoy yourself!’ He closed his eyes, bowed his head as he leant against the counter. He imagined her writing it, cleaning everything away, thinking before choosing those words. Then walking heavily up to their bed, folding her clothes, moving her large, soft body around their room. Falling asleep alone while her husband ejaculated in someone’s mouth. A man’s mouth.

He couldn’t eat, but he scraped the food into a plastic bag and tucked it towards the bottom of the bin, underneath the rest of the rubbish. Then he walked upstairs slowly, wearily, and crept into the room and lay down beside Brigitte. She wasn’t snoring, had clearly not been asleep.

‘Is everything all right? What time is it?’

‘It’s midnight,’ he said. ‘Everything’s fine, my darling. You can go to sleep.’

‘Did you eat your lamb?’

‘It was delicious,’ he said, as quietly and gently as if talking to a tired child.

She didn’t reach out for him; she never did. After their first abortive attempts at love-making, when they first married – he twisted his face at the memory of her great pink thighs straddling his hips, the fumbling of her hand around his retracted penis – she had barely grumbled or complained about the largely sexless partnership they maintained. There was the odd time, still, perhaps two or three times a year: in the total dark of night, thankfully free from foreplay or words, when he was driven by privation to indiscriminate urgency. But physical intimacy beyond the most purely anatomical was something she had had to learn to do without.

He wanted to turn to her now, stroke her hair or say something kind, but he felt too deadened, too heavy even to reach out his hand. He lay on his back, apart from her, staring into the darkness.

Marguerite turned her bedside lamp on and sat up in bed, blinking. She hugged her knees to her chest and listened. There was a toad’s high rattle like a burglar alarm outside her window; it reminded her of summer childhoods by lakes, where she and Cassandre had been wimps in the face of all the insects and creatures, however hard they’d pretended to be intrepid.

She rested her left cheek on her knees, studying her little room. The broken chair, the empty suitcase under the wardrobe. The tired rug stretched out on the floor.

She had switched the light on to try to escape a constant showreel of memories and images playing in her mind’s eye as she lay trying to sleep – as if the light might force them to scatter, like launching a floodlight on a pack of thieves. But the position she was sitting in now – knees to chest, face on knees, ears pricked, bedside lamp on – was too familiar for forgetting. She had sat exactly like this so many times that it almost felt as familiar to her as sleep.

She closed her eyes, the light glowing pink through her eyelids, and let herself slide back into one of the nights before everything changed. She pictured herself from the outside: a fourteen-year-old sitting up in the pristinely elegant cream bedroom her mother had designed for her. The wallpaper was feathered with very slightly raised, pale green swirls. She wasn’t allowed to pin or tack things onto the wall so she tried to rebel by covering the bedside table with neon-framed photographs of her and her friends on school trips or at birthday parties. Hiding cigarettes behind their backs, so that the innocuous photos held a secret challenge. She used to hang dream-catchers and strings of gaudy beads from the polished bedposts; aged ten, Cassandre had already started to imitate this but she couldn’t quite get it right. With plastic pony charms and hearts, her arrangements looked too young. If only Marguerite had just given her some of her own.

The night their mother first left them was one of those nights: Marguerite was sitting up listening to her parents arguing. She was used to it by then; she spoke to her best friend Adeline about it sometimes in quiet corners at school, drawing her face in and making it sound much more dramatic than it was. ‘I worry for their lives, sometimes,’ she’d say, but that was dazzlingly untrue: her father would never have raised a hand against her mother, nor her mother – tiny and skinny, her meticulously sculpted arms weak – against him. Indeed, their lack of physical contact seemed to constitute a great part of the complaints they routinely filed against each other during the day. At night, on the other hand, specific words were hard to make out through the muffler of the bedroom walls; theirs was an amorphous volley of snarling, parodying, occasional bellowing. It was a tidal swell of rage, it came and went through the night, and Marguerite stayed up to listen, mostly for Cassandre’s sake. Four years younger, she was not yet sophisticated enough to hear the fights without fear and distress.

Inevitably the door handle would swivel slowly and Cassandre would appear with her little helmet of dark hair ruffled from sleep. She’d stand in the doorway until Marguerite beckoned her in. She had a beautiful face before everything changed; surely it was not just through the prism of an older sister’s pride that Marguerite thought that. It was tidy and pointed and neat, her skin a bit darker than Marguerite’s, her lips a very perfect bow.

She’d get under the covers at the foot of Marguerite’s bed and ask her to sing. Until recently, Marguerite had always sung when Cassandre asked. Usually it was a little ditty she had invented, chronicling the adventures of two unlikely friends: a chimp, blundering yet grandiose, and a nightingale. She improvised the words each time, inventing a new adventure for the pair. Cassandre would join in when the chorus came.

But Cassandre hadn’t yet left école primaire, whereas Marguerite was already coming to the end of collège, starting soon at the lycée; she had kissed two boys, she’d smoked cigarettes and tried vodka, she had recently got her period and bought a white bra that she filled carefully with folded tissue. Things were different; she would still defend Cassandre to the death but she no longer sang willingly whenever asked. As a result, Cass had taken to begging, which annoyed Marguerite.

‘The Chimp and the Nightingale, Margo?’ she asked.

‘Not tonight, Cass.’ But because she looked sad, Marguerite added: ‘I’ll sing to you tomorrow. I’ve just had a really long day: double maths in the morning and double Latin in the afternoon, and I have to get up early to finish extra homework from Madame Garcia because she’s a complete bitch.’

‘Poor you,’ said Cassandre. ‘That sounds so stressful.’ She had learnt the word ‘stressful’ from Marguerite, and used it constantly.

‘It is. And Monsieur Clerc’s an imbecile, and the boys in my class are even bigger imbeciles.’ She sighed dramatically. ‘Enjoy primaire while you can.’ Cassandre nodded, wriggling down further under the covers. ‘How’s your homework, Cass? Are you revising hard enough?’

‘I think so.’

‘You’re a little brainbox.’

‘Hmm, I don’t know.’

‘Well, I do. You’re a brilliant little geek. I bet you get the highest marks in your year.’

The toad started rattling again and Marguerite opened her eyes, back in Jérôme’s quiet house. She sat completely still, treasuring the memory but also aware that she was inventing the conversation. She always did this: she let her younger self become her ideal of Cassandre’s older sister. Always guiding, always supportive. Would she really have been so kind that night? She remembered the slamming of doors, her father coming into the room to declare that their mother had left them all. It was the first time she’d done this, and they didn’t know better than to doubt its permanence. She remembered Cassandre crying and her father’s willowy frame disappearing back into the darkness; she remembered holding her little sister and drying her tears, eventually getting her to sleep. But she couldn’t remember whether she’d sung.

‘Please say I sang, please say I sang.’ She closed her eyes and shook her head to banish the thoughts and images. She lay back down, leaving the lamp on, hoping that Jérôme would call her down to tend to him. ‘Please say I sang.’

5

Jérôme was sick all morning. He refused, over and over, to sit up to vomit, and dragged his weight down in her arms when she tried to force him to. She had to give up, pulling him instead to the very side of the mattress so he could retch sideways into the bin. He hadn’t eaten much the night before and there was next to nothing for him to bring up. A senseless, repetitive heaving went on throughout the morning, punctuated by protracted groans like a woman in labour.

As the hours wore on she started to feel angry at the sheer relentlessness of his vomiting. She was rough with him when she pulled him repeatedly onto his side, and almost shouted when he disobeyed her instructions.

‘Do you want to choke on your own vomit? Do you think that would be enjoyable?’

He in turn was obstructive and difficult, but she caught a look sometimes in his eyes that was fearful. In regret, she would lower her voice and cool his forehead, but then the heaving and the refusal to get into the right position would start again and her frustration would flare.

Finally the gaps between retching were longer than twenty minutes, but she still didn’t dare leave his room. She let him lie back and close his eyes, and then she sat at the bedroom table, exhausted. She needed to eat, but she couldn’t face getting up. She couldn’t even face cleaning the bin out; it sat by the side of the bed and the room stank. Jérôme started to snore, a faint and reedy sound.

She was startled by a loud knock coming from the kitchen; so too was Jérôme, who snorted and opened his eyes, glassy and distant, before falling back to sleep. She picked up the bin, taking it from the room as she walked through the house to the kitchen.

‘Shit,’ she said under her breath as she saw Suki’s face peering through the glass of the kitchen door. She tried to smile as she opened the door but it couldn’t have been convincing.

‘Is it a bad time?’ Suki asked.

‘Well, quite, yes,’ she said, letting her come in. ‘Hold on a moment.’

She turned, taking the bin out into the utility room. She took her time to rinse it out with hot water and bleach. You don’t just turn up, unannounced, on someone’s job, she thought. When she had finished rinsing it out, she took it back into Jérôme’s room, setting it down by the bed. Then she turned him, finally malleable with sleep, onto his side. His mouth gaped.

She smelt Suki’s smoke before she came back into the kitchen.

‘Can you take that outside?’ she said. It came out harshly, rudely. ‘It floats through the house,’ she said, more softly.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Suki. She opened the kitchen door and stood there, gazing at Marguerite. Half in shade and half in sunlight, she looked more beautiful than Marguerite had realised she could. ‘I think I’ve come at a bad time and you’re cross.’

‘I’m sorry to seem that way. I’m just very busy. Jérôme’s not well.’

‘Of course.’ She reached down to open the little violet bag that hung by her hip, and took out a folded piece of paper. She handed it over. ‘Have a look,’ she said.

Marguerite unfolded it: it was a flyer for a spring fête in the village. There were bad illustrations of lambs and ducklings with big eyes and long eyelashes.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Suki said. ‘Why is Suki giving me an invitation to a ghastly spring fête, I can’t think of anything worse. Right?’

‘Well, not ghastly.’

‘Marguerite!’ Suki let her head fall back to look at the sky. ‘Don’t be so polite! I know perfectly well you would have no interest in a village fête.’

She looked at her, raising an eyebrow in a way that seemed rehearsed, imitated perhaps from someone onscreen.

‘Okay, it doesn’t exactly sound like my kind of thing,’ she said.

Suki watched her for a moment. ‘I know I’m sort of foisting myself on you,’ she said, ‘and you have absolutely no wish for my company.’

Marguerite started to protest but she raised her hands to stop her.

‘Stop, don’t say anything. But I’m going to keep trying, because I don’t think it’s right that you’re out here in the middle of nowhere with absolutely no company whatsoever. Apart from Lanvier.’ She rolled her eyes and took a last, concentrated drag on her cigarette, little lines appearing around her lips as she sucked. She dropped the butt onto the ground beside her and stamped it out, leaning against the doorframe. ‘The reason I’m here is because I need your help.’

‘Aha,’ said Marguerite. She stood. ‘Coffee?’

‘Badly needed, yes please.’

She took the kettle to the sink, closing her eyes as she let the water run. She heard cupboards open and close; when she turned, Suki was busying herself shaking coffee into a large, beaten-up cafetière Marguerite had never used.

‘I have an instinct for where things are kept,’ she said, smiling. ‘That had to be a cups and cafetière cupboard. Just as I bet you keep saucepans in that one, down there. Am I right?’

‘Yes.’

‘You see? It’s like I have an instinct for good housekeeping but no knowledge of how to implement it. You’ve seen my place, it’s a total bombsite.’

‘It’s a great location.’

‘Yes and no. I love being able to spy on everyone. And I can avoid them all, I simply wait for the coast to be clear before I walk out the door. But on the other hand, I’m stuck right in the thick of it. I get so claustrophobic there. Sometimes I picture a huge hand coming down and tearing the house from its foundations and carrying it thousands of miles away.’

‘Where would it take the house?’ asked Marguerite. ‘The giant hand.’

‘Iran. The mountains. Lorestan province.’ The kettle clicked and steam rose; Marguerite made to pick it up but Suki reached out to stop her. ‘You mustn’t pour it when it’s still boiling. It should be about 85 degrees. I’ll do it.’

Marguerite stood back as Suki removed the kettle lid and together they watched the steam escape and thin. Suki took it from its perch, lifted it high above the cafetière.

‘You should also pour it onto the coffee from a height,’ she said. She poured, let it rest, stirred it carefully with a knife lying in the sink. ‘Now we leave it again before we plunge.’

She walked over to the door again and stood there to light her second cigarette. ‘What about you?’

‘Me?’

‘The hand. Where would it take you?’

Marguerite shrugged. She tried hard to think of somewhere, anywhere. ‘I don’t really know.’

‘Surely Paris?’

‘God, no.’ Suki’s eyes focused more intently on her face and she regretted the strength of her reaction. ‘Too hectic,’ she said, to explain herself. She lifted the cafetière and placed it down on the table. ‘Am I allowed to plunge it yet?’

Suki gestured with one hand as she blew out a jet of smoke. ‘You are allowed,’ she said, smiling. ‘Slowly, though. What was I saying before? My house. Yes, it’s lovely. But I hate that fucking place.’

Something about the immediacy of the comment made Marguerite laugh. Suki seemed surprised, and laughed too.

‘It’s all twee little houses and paper-doily curtains and the same small-minded little people wandering around talking about how big their aubergines grew last harvest.’ She took a long drag. ‘I’m not even exaggerating. That’s the kind of thing they talk about.’

‘But there must be some normal people,’ said Marguerite.

‘No, the point is that they are normal. Too normal. Paralysingly normal. There are some good ones – little Luc, the librarian. A very smart guy. We have quite a famous writer living in the woods, Edgar DuChamp.’ She looked at Marguerite expectantly, but she shook her head; she’d never heard of him. ‘And there’s Madame Brun, a barmy old woman – three metres tall or something – who only wears black. Have you seen her?’

Again, Marguerite shook her head. ‘What about your husband?’

‘Philippe?’ Suki forced a laugh. ‘He’s worse than the rest.’ She stared into the distance for a moment, scratching her neck with one of her long painted nails, and for a moment Marguerite was reminded of a bird of prey. ‘I’m just kidding, he’s not that bad. But I get so bored, Marguerite.’

The use of her name jarred, suggestive of an unearned intimacy. As if she sensed it too, Suki threw her unfinished cigarette away and came back to sit at the table.

‘I haven’t even explained why I’m here,’ she said. ‘So this fête. Hear me out – it’s actually not as bad as you’d think. It happens every May, and it’s just the village selling various things and showing off their produce or their latest haircut. And everyone brings their ugly little dogs that look like rats and they dress them up in ugly little outfits.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve made it sound dire, haven’t I?’ Again she laughed, and it occurred to Marguerite for the first time that she might be nervous. ‘But anyway, so I’m bored and what the hell, I’ve signed up to do a stall.’

‘What kind of stall?’

There had been a small change in Suki’s expression, a flicker of something in her smile. Marguerite noticed a faint blush rising up over her cheeks.

‘Last year I ran a fancy-dress stall for the kids. I piled up all the amazing scarves and headpieces and costume jewellery I have – I love collecting these things – and bunged them on the stall and invited all the children to dress up in them.’

‘That sounds like a great idea.’

‘Well, yes, I thought so too. But the problem is absolutely no one let their kids come and use the clothes. I actually heard one woman tell her nephew not to touch anything from “the mystic’s little box of tricks”.’

‘The mystic?’

‘They call me the mystic. I think they think I’m some kind of witch doctor or something.’

‘Why?’

Suki shrugged. ‘My hijab? It makes me want to shake them. I want to say, there are no witch doctors, there’s no voodoo in Iran. We’re more civilised than the lot of you.’ She looked quickly at Marguerite, watching for offence, and affected a more relaxed expression. ‘Maybe they just confuse “Suki” with “Sufi”. Though actually they’re too ignorant to know what Sufism is.’

‘It sounds ridiculous either way.’

‘Yes, it is. Ridiculous. And I felt ridiculous standing behind a stall dressed in my most beautiful clothes with the entire contents of my wardrobe displayed in front of me and not a single child even allowed to come near. And they wanted to, you know? I could see it, especially the little girls. They were itching to try on all the pretty things.’ She got up and lit yet another cigarette by the door. ‘So I’m not making that mistake again this year. This year, I’m running a simple bric-a-brac stall. You’ve seen my house, you’ve seen all my things. Well I have piles more hidden away in my attic and Philippe’s been at me for years to clear it out, so I thought, right, let’s see if they’ll stay away from my stall this time. Greedy little shits.’

She was slouching a little as she spoke, staring intently at a point on the doorframe, sucking at her cigarette. The soft beauty Marguerite had caught earlier was gone; she looked sad, shrunken, hard.

‘I think it sounds like a good idea,’ Marguerite said, though she thought the opposite. If they wouldn’t let their children dress up in her clothes, why did Suki think they’d want her ornaments?

But Suki looked at her gratefully. ‘You think so? I think so too.’ She sighed. ‘Anyway, it’s probably stupid to bother getting involved, but I just can’t bear hiding away in my house pretending I don’t know they all hate me. I live in Saint-Sulpice too. I have a right to be there.’

‘Of course.’

‘So. I want you to come to the fête and I want you to pretend to buy a few of my things.’

Marguerite laughed; she had expected something more onerous.

‘I know it’s pathetic,’ Suki said, smiling ruefully. ‘Will you do it though? I have money here, for you to spend.’ She fiddled with her bag again, took some notes out. ‘Here’s fifty euros. You can even keep whatever you buy. I’m basically giving it to you.’

‘Okay. I can come, but not for long.’

‘That’s fine. But you’ll definitely come?’

Marguerite felt uncomfortable, constricted, as she always did when she was asked to make a commitment.

‘As long as Jérôme is okay.’

‘Great. Okay. You’ll be there.’ She came in to put the money on the table. ‘Well, I’m going to let you be now, but thank you. I won’t forget it.’

She leant forward to kiss Marguerite on each cheek. Above the smoke, she smelt of vanilla or coconut – something too sweet.

She didn’t wake Jérôme for lunch; she let him sleep, and he only called her to him mid-afternoon by knocking on his headboard, so faintly she barely heard it.

‘I feel much better,’ he said when she went in. But his face was still wax-coloured, and his lips, usually wide and strangely full for a man, were puckered and pale.

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

‘What are those?’ He pointed weakly at a small blue jug she’d placed on the table when he was asleep, holding a cluster of wild flowers she’d found in the garden. He looked at her with an expression she couldn’t decipher. It was wary, she thought, but not irritated; there was a softness in his face.

‘I found them in the olive groves, growing wild. Someone really needs to take over the garden; it could be so beautiful.’

‘It was,’ he said. ‘You’ve spent a while outside. You’re a little sunburnt.’

‘Surely I’m not,’ she said, touching her cheeks. ‘I wasn’t out there for long.’

‘Not burnt, a little tanned.’ He smiled, the very faintest of smiles.

She brought him bread and jam to eat, and sweet tea. The room smelt rancid from his morning of sickness, and she cleaned it as he ate.

‘I’m glad you’ve got an appetite,’ she said and he nodded, opening his mouth to take a bite. Some jam dripped off the bread and onto his chest, but he didn’t notice. There was a crumb fastened in the corner of his mouth. These things felt unbearably sad to her then; she came forward to wipe the jam away with a tissue, and he frowned.

‘You’re forever fussing.’

‘I’m going to change your sheets,’ she said when she’d taken his tray, and he nodded again. He leant into her arms as she lifted him up and they shuffled together towards the chair. It was odd, she realised, that she knew his smell more intimately than her own.

It was not until the next morning that Jérôme regained his usual strength: he had colour in his cheeks, sat upright in the bed. He was galvanised all the more by hunger; he snapped at her for food, refusing to let her clean his teeth first, and gobbled his toast loudly, flecks of spit collecting in the corners of his mouth.

‘I’d like chocolate,’ he said when he’d finished.

She smiled. ‘I don’t think we have any.’

‘Why not? Have you eaten it?’

‘We haven’t had any in the house for weeks. I didn’t know you particularly liked it.’

‘Well, don’t just presume,’ he said, his eyebrows screwed together to form a deep, fleshy crease between them. Marguerite noticed that a couple of the coarse white eyebrow hairs had grown long beyond the others, indeed beyond proportion; they strayed up towards his hairline, as if trying to replace the hair that had been lost there.

‘What are you looking at?’

‘Nothing.’ She filled his glass from the jug, gave it to him. ‘You must stay well hydrated today.’

But he pushed the glass away, and stared in front of him. ‘Get me something else to eat. And I don’t mean more bread, I’m sick to death of bread.’

As Marguerite walked through to the kitchen, she realised she was pleased by his bad temper, signifying as it did his return to relative health. She took raisin biscuits from a tin and arranged them on a plate to bring back to him, but when she re-entered his room and set the plate down on his bedside table he didn’t even register them.

‘I heard a voice here yesterday.’

‘When?’

‘You know when, come on. I’ve just remembered, I heard talking when I was drifting in and out of sleep. Yesterday. Come on, I’m not stupid.’

‘Of course not.’

‘Who was it? Was someone coming to see me?’

‘No,’ she said, and she saw something slacken in his face. A ripple passed over his forehead, around his eyes and mouth. His shoulders dropped. He stared down the bed for a moment, unfocused.

‘It was a woman from the village,’ she said, for the sake of saying something.

‘Name?’ he asked.

‘She’s called Suki.’

‘Suki Lacourse,’ he said immediately, his interest rekindled. ‘Arab, married to Philippe Lacourse. He’s a prime cretin. Why in God’s name was she here?’

‘Iranian. She just passed by.’

‘How do you know her?’

‘I’ve met her a few times in the village.’

‘So you’re socialising, are you? How nice for you.’

‘I’m not socialising.’

‘You could have fooled me.’

‘I spend every moment in an empty house with you.’

‘Henri Brochon was here last week. Suki Lacourse is dropping by on social visits. What next? I’m going to wake up to a party at the end of my bed.’

She couldn’t help smiling, then, because it was too ridiculous. He smiled too, unexpectedly; it was a wry smile, a little sheepish.

‘So you refuse to tell me why that woman was visiting the house. What could you possibly have to do with someone like that? She’s old enough to be your mother.’

‘She’s not even forty,’ she said. ‘And anyway, she had a favour to ask.’

He frowned. ‘I’d watch out for her, if I were you.’

‘Why?’

‘She’s trouble.’

‘Why do you think that?’

‘She’s – different.’

‘You mean foreign.’

He looked at her with irritation. ‘No. She makes trouble because she’s never adapted to her environment.’

‘Has her environment adapted to her?’

‘Of course not. Why should it?’

Marguerite shook her head. She didn’t have the energy.

‘You think I’m talking about her being a Muslim, but I’m not. I’m talking about her aspirations. She’s lived here, what, twenty years? But she hasn’t accepted anything. She doesn’t accept that she’s married to a boring man, living in a boring house in a boring village, and that ultimately, for all her exoticism, she’s pretty damn boring herself.’ He licked his lips and paused. ‘You may not think I know much, but I do know that people who don’t adjust their expectations cause trouble.’

Marguerite said nothing, and Jérôme smiled again. ‘You, for example,’ he said, his tone gentler, ‘have quashed all your expectations, all your aspirations, and therefore you’re no trouble at all.’

She saw, with some shock, that he wasn’t needling – that he didn’t expect this to offend her at all. But his words caused instant, tangible pain. She felt anger rising up inside her, a rush of it.

‘Thank you for your armchair analysis, but you know absolutely nothing about my life.’

‘I was joking with you, for God’s sake,’ he said.

‘And the only reason behind people thinking that Suki is “trouble” is bigotry.’ He tried to say something, but she interrupted. ‘Of course you don’t adapt to a place if you’re treated like an outsider from beginning to end, and you’re left out of things, whatever you do.’

She was inarticulate in her anger; he swiped the air calmly, dismissing her words. ‘Let me tell you, Marguerite,’ he said, ‘the delusion of centrality and the self-doubt involved in feeling left out translate into one’s behaviour, one’s words, even one’s body language. All of that renders a person sufficiently unattractive to company that they end up actually being left out. It’s circular, it fulfils itself.’

He looked up at the ceiling and licked his lips again, satisfied; she imagined clearly how he would have behaved as the boss of his company, how staggeringly arrogant he must have been before old age started to degrade him.

‘Thank you for the lecture,’ she said, instantly regretting those words. They played themselves back in her mind, immature and empty. He laughed to himself, reaching for a biscuit.

‘Silly girl. I found another weak spot.’

She left the room and walked straight through the kitchen, past the stupid little clusters of flowers she’d been arranging. She kicked the door open, swearing, and stopped outside, hot tears starting in her eyes.

She heard a sound, then, nearby, and sensed the men’s presence before she saw them. Henri Brochon and his farmhands, lugging the trunk of the ailing oak towards the driveway. So it was finally dead. They looked away, embarrassed for her, and she didn’t even try to acknowledge them or gather herself. She walked back into the kitchen with her head down and went straight upstairs to her bedroom, burying her face in the pillow until the humiliation receded, dream and reality becoming fused.

Brigitte had a special way of folding sheets and tablecloths. She’d invented it herself, when she was around fourteen. She didn’t like to teach it, in case someone might show someone else and pass it off as their own. That would annoy her, not because she wanted glory but because she couldn’t stand anything that wasn’t fair.

On the other hand, she had to admit she liked people to see her do it. It was very fast, very effective. She held the two corners at diagonals from each other, and through a series of wrist flicks the entire sheet ended up lying flat, in a diagonal half, on the table in front of her. It could then, with just two further folds, end up as a tidy square of fabric. Fold it once again and it would fit perfectly on a shelf: a slim, flat, unrumpled rectangle.

She felt Laure watching as she applied her method to sheet after white sheet. ‘Amazing how you do that,’ she said.

‘It’s a handy trick.’

She smoothed one, adding it to the tidy pile.

‘So how many double sheets have we got between us?’ asked Laure. ‘Fifteen?’

‘Fifteen white, and a further two or three if I throw in pink and blue too. We could use the coloured sheets for the flower-arranging stall?’

‘That’s an idea.’ Laure wrote down the figures in her book.

‘And an old one for face-painting, because it’ll get stained, however washable those paints claim to be.’ Laure nodded, and Brigitte kept folding.

‘I’m looking forward to the flower-arranging,’ said Laure. ‘I can’t wait to trample over Anne-Marie’s dismal collection again.’

‘Why does she even bother entering? You beat her every year. It’s embarrassing.’

Brigitte was the judge for the fête’s flower-arranging competition, so she didn’t enter – which was just as well, since she suspected she might outdo Laure’s arrangements. Laure’s were very pretty – lavish, abundant, scrupulously tidy – but Brigitte simply had a greater variety to work from. The farm gardens were filled with them.

‘Speaking of embarrassing,’ said Laure, rooting through her sewing basket to find pins for corsages, ‘Madame Lacourse is entering again. You know that, don’t you?’

Brigitte looked quickly at Laure, who didn’t look up, still looking for something in the basket. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I had no idea.’

‘I thought you knew,’ Laure said casually, taking a spool of blue ribbon from the basket and holding it against a band of blue elastic. ‘Not quite the right shade,’ she said quietly, frowning; then she looked up and blinked. ‘Are you bothered? She’ll make a fool of herself, like usual.’

‘Well, I just would have liked to know.’

‘Of course. I presumed you would know.’ She looked very serious, then. ‘Do you mean she didn’t apply to you?’

‘No, she didn’t.’

Now this was something; everyone in the village applied to Brigitte and Laure with their stall ideas – they had to do so by the end of February so that due planning could be done. And everyone knew to write to them both.

‘Oh. That’s odd – she applied to me pretty early. She was one of the first, actually. I presumed she would have written to you too.’

‘Apparently she doesn’t think I’m important enough.’

‘Oh you know it’s not that,’ said Laure. ‘She’s threatened by you, Brigitte, she always has been.’

‘Well,’ said Brigitte. She hadn’t folded the last sheet quite right; she felt distracted. She shook it out and started again. ‘What’s the stall, anyway?’

‘She hasn’t named it yet. As far as I can make out from the description, it’ll be a load of her shabby old knick-knacks from Timbuktu to God knows where.’

Brigitte was stuck. She needed Henri at the fête; she had asked him expressly to leave the farm in Paul’s hands that day, since she needed him to oversee her stalls while she judged the flower-arranging and artichokes, and to help set up in the morning. But still, though she trusted him, she didn’t like the thought of Suki’s stall attracting his attention, or the possibility that it might give them a chance to chat. At least fifteen years had passed since Suki’s obsession, but it still unsettled Brigitte. She hated the woman’s make-up, her painted nails and swaying walk. She hated her cigarettes, her air of sophistication. And while Henri had assured Brigitte that he didn’t find the woman attractive either, she remembered just once or twice witnessing his interest in what Suki had to say. She would ‘drop by’ when she knew his day would be winding up, and sit in their kitchen keeping his attention as he stood by the counter, drinking his beer. She could talk about poets and philosophers and films – things Henri found interesting that Brigitte could never find the time to care about. There was no one in the world but Suki who could get under Brigitte’s skin like that.

‘Don’t worry about it, Brigitte. I’m sure we can make her stall as successful as last year’s,’ Laure said, smiling. Brigitte laughed.

‘You’re awful,’ she said, but she felt relieved.

‘Poor girl,’ said Thierry.

‘Yes, poor girl,’ said his brother. ‘She looked like she was having a breakdown.’ He laughed, not unkindly.

‘I didn’t think Parisian girls swore like that. I should have covered your ears, Rémy. I don’t think you’ve even heard those words before.’

‘Shut up,’ Rémy said, grinning.

‘It was kind of hot actually. Boss?’ he asked, leaning forward between Rémy and Henri’s seats.

‘What?’

‘Is the old man really that bad?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean does he make everyone have a nervous breakdown?’

‘No,’ Henri said. ‘Don’t be stupid.’

‘It’s just, she looked pretty wound up.’

‘Be quiet,’ said Rémy, looking at Henri. ‘It’s not funny.’

‘Not funny at all, an attractive young woman all on her own, all wound up with no one to vent her frustration onto …’

Rémy laughed and Thierry continued, encouraged. ‘She must need a shoulder to cry on. Boss, do you have Monsieur Lanvier’s number? I could call to just, you know, check everything’s okay.’

‘I said don’t be stupid,’ said Henri, too crossly. Rémy’s smile dropped; Thierry fell silent. Henri sensed their confusion, but he didn’t care. The expression on her face had been one of torment, and Henri was reminded once again of a teenage Thibault, kicking gravel in the driveway at Rossignol, staring out of the gates, eyes glazed with a vision of some other life.

At home, he walked straight through the kitchen, barely acknowledging Brigitte and Laure as they greeted him. He walked through to his study and closed the door and sat down, staring at the wall. He’d been rude to the women, unreasonable with Thierry and Rémy. But it was intrusive, the boys joking about something even he was not qualified to understand. They didn’t know the Lanviers or the nurse, had no right to comment.

He leant back in his chair, closing his eyes. He was bored, and frustrated, and the inevitable prospect of masturbation depressed him. He must be the most prolific wanker in the whole of the Languedoc, he thought; literally, the biggest wanker. Handsome Henri, who could have had his pick of all the women, had chosen instead to spend a life of loyal devotion to his right hand. Granted, he cheated occasionally on this life partner, the odd furious fuck coming between them – but deviation only made their relationship stronger, less suffused as it was with sordidness and shame.

He opened his eyes, turned to see his face reflected in the glass of the painting beside him. He didn’t recognise his expression as his own: the grim half-smile, the tired eyes. He sighed and unfastened his trousers and let himself wank quickly, without enthusiasm. Then he cleaned himself carefully with a tissue, screwed it into a ball and threw it into the bin. Brigitte wouldn’t be best pleased when she emptied the bin out, but she could think what she liked. He’d given up caring.

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