Читать книгу: «Nightingale», страница 2

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.