Читать книгу: «Nightingale»

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.’