Trespass (12 page)

As Kitty walked towards the water, she wondered: Doesn’t every love need to create for itself its own protected space? And if so, why don’t lovers understand better the damage trespass can do? It made her furious to think how easily Veronica was colluding with the unspoken open-endedness of Anthony’s visit – as though he was the one who mattered most to her, who had the right to come first and always would, and it was up to her, Kitty, to accept this hierarchy with grown-up grace and not make a fuss.

And of course Anthony knew all this. He no doubt enjoyed the knowledge. Enjoyed seeing ‘V’s little friend’ relegated to second place. It was possible that he’d let his stay drag on into summer or beyond, just to persecute her, to do his best to destroy Veronica’s love.

Reaching the river, Kitty turned right and walked along the narrow path above the churning, dazzling water. She saw that the grey beach where she’d sat with Veronica was flooded and would only reveal itself again when the heat of July came back and the river shrank to a slow-moving channel. Boulders that had been stranded mid-stream last year were submerged now, and Kitty could imagine all the newly hatched brown trout beginning their lives in this sheltering darkness, nibbling at the green protein-rich weed that billowed up from the shingle bed.

Thinking about the innocent lives of fish, Kitty found that she was crying.

She stumbled on. She wanted to sit down and cry properly. But there was nowhere to sit. There was only the narrow path, just wide enough for one person, and nothing to do but to follow that, until she felt able to turn round and go back.

Anthony believed she’d done it on purpose, to spoil his moment of happiness, and this made him all the more determined not to let her ruin the whole day or distract him from his plan, which was now to visit as many estate agents as he could find in Ruasse.

They were on their way there at last, after waiting half an hour for Kitty to show up. Veronica drove and Anthony sat in the front and nobody said a word. Kitty rested her head against the window and closed her eyes.

No doubt, thought Anthony, she wants to go straight home, to stare at her hopeless watercolours and drum up some way of getting rid of me. But I’m not going to let her get rid of me. I’m Anthony Verey and I’m myself again: I’m
the
Anthony Verey . . .

In Ruasse, Veronica parked the car in the market square, under white plane trees just coming into leaf, as the sun began its decline and a suggestion of cold was felt again in the air. On the opposite side of the square were two agents and Veronica directed Anthony towards these, saying she’d catch him up.

‘All right,’ he said. But he said it wearily, to let his sister know that he disapproved of her pandering to the moods and whims of Kitty Meadows. Kitty, he thought, should have been left to stew in the back of the car while he and V went and looked at photographs of houses. Indeed, this would have been ideal, to strand her in the car, lock her in like a child, while they, the Vereys, got their first glimpse of his future . . .

He strode off across the square, still wearing his cricketing hat, hearing the click and knock of a
boules
game in the sandy gravel, the chime of an ancient clock. Ruasse, he’d been told, had two souls and this was one of them, its old soul, defined by the white plane trees and narrow, tilting buildings with clay roofs and a clutch of expensive shops. But its other soul was elsewhere, on the margins of the town, where high-rise flats balanced on flimsy foundations. If you could keep from coming face to face with this other soul, so much the better, or so V had said.

Now, Anthony stood at an estate agent’s window. His heart was racing. He began to stare at photographs and prices. Through the glass door of the premises, he could glimpse two women at work on their computers under cold strips of industrial light. He saw them glance up and stare at his comical hat.

Veronica sat in her kitchen and smoked and listened to the stillness of the night.

In front of her on the kitchen table were half-finished sketches of a garden she was designing for clients at Saint-Bertrand. She wasn’t working on the drawings exactly, just moving her pencil around, shading in stands of box and a line of yew buttresses over which the clients had rhapsodised. Veronica knew that these buttresses would take three years to look solid enough to form the architectural shape that had so thrilled Monsieur and Madame, but she hadn’t dared to mention this. She got tired of repeating that gardens took time, that they weren’t like interiors, that you had to have patience. She knew she didn’t live in a patient world. Even here, where life went along more slowly than in England, she could sense the restless agitation people felt to make real and tangible to them the fugitive wonders that flickered into their minds.

Tonight, Veronica’s own heart was agitated. The day had begun well, ended badly. She’d had to be severe with Kitty in the car in Ruasse, had to say to her that nothing, no,
nothing
would stop her from caring for Anthony, because he was her brother, and if she, Kitty, expected her to stop loving him, then they were all in grave trouble.

She knew Kitty had been crying and this upset her. Whenever she remembered where Kitty had come from, and allowed her mind to form some torturing image of Kitty laying breakfast tables in the Cromer guest house, waiting on a shabby clientèle who left stingy tips, then toiling off to her lowly job in the library, her heart felt like breaking. She wished she could have changed Kitty’s past, retrospectively. But the past was the past. You couldn’t change it. And this was what she’d had to remind her in the car: ‘You have your past and I have mine and Anthony was a part of mine and I’m never going to push him away. Not for you. Not for anybody. Never.’

She saw the word have its effect on Kitty. And knew that Kitty still hadn’t understood how strong was Veronica’s need to protect Anthony – from the world and from himself. So she began to explain it again: how, when they were children, Raymond Verey, the handsome father who was so often missing from home, bullied his son, called him weak, puny, babyish, kept asking him when he was going to ‘become a real boy’. Lal, still enslaved by Raymond Verey, had mainly stood silently by when he did this, but she, Veronica, had formed the habit of speaking out for her brother.

‘I hated my father for tormenting Anthony,’ said Veronica. ‘It wasn’t Anthony’s fault that he wasn’t sporty or strong. I was those things, but he wasn’t. He was thin and dreamy. He liked doing little domestic pastimes with Ma.’

Veronica remembered very vividly Anthony’s obsessive love for Lal. She’d had to protect him from that as well, she explained to Kitty. On days when she saw him almost dying of hurt, she’d had to try to protect him from his own feelings.

‘What about you?’ asked Kitty. ‘Who protected you from anything or anyone?’

‘I told you: I was OK,’ said Veronica. ‘I was impervious to a lot of things. And I had my pony, Susan. I talked to her. Susan and I would go and tear round the jumps and I’d forget everything. I was fine. But when Ma turned away from Anthony, he died.’

She evoked one such day. It had been Anthony’s eleventh or twelfth birthday and Lal had driven them to Swanage beach for a birthday picnic. It had been just three of them. Raymond was in London, as usual, living his own distant life. And it was high summer, with a hot sun shining and the sea calm and blue. And they ate the delicious picnic Lal had prepared, everything except the birthday cake, which they were saving for later, and then they went swimming.

Lal, elegant as ever, was zippered into a skin-tight, lime-green bathing costume. But when the swim was over and she tried to get out of the wet costume, the zip jammed, and there she was – with a wind whipping up now and the sky clouding over – getting cold and cross. She tugged and tugged at the zip, then she tried to get herself out of the costume without undoing it, but it was too tight.

Anthony danced about on the sand, his face white with terror. He gave his own towel to Lal, but she tossed it away, saying, ‘Don’t be stupid, Anthony. That thing’s soaking wet.’ She threw him the car keys and sent him off over the dunes, wearing his sagging bathing trunks, to get pliers from the tool-kit of the Hillman Minx. He came panting back with the whole toolbox and Lal lifted her shapely brown arm impatiently while he searched for the pliers among the jumble of wrenches and spanners and then found them and clenched the zip head with them and attempted to drag the zip down.

But the zip wouldn’t move. Lal was going blue-white with cold, her whole body in a spasm of shivering. ‘Come on!’ she kept shouting at him. ‘Come on, Anthony! For God’s sake fix it! Can’t you see I’m freezing to death?’

He was freezing too and his hands were shaking. And then he accidentally let the pliers bite into the soft white flesh underneath Lal’s arm and she gave a scream and pushed Anthony away from her and he fell backwards into the sand and began sobbing.

He spent his days trying to please her and now, when she was in trouble, when she needed him, he’d only managed to wound her.

‘He couldn’t bear what he’d done,’ said Veronica. ‘It traumatised him. To have hurt Lal! To have drawn blood! It was the worst thing he could imagine.’

‘So what did
you
do?’ asked Kitty quietly.

‘Well, I think I put my hanky on Ma’s wound and told her to hold it there, or something like that, and then I tried to get them both warm. I got the rug from the car and made them sit down close together and I wrapped them in it. Anthony just clung to Ma and cried and I said, “That’s good, Anthony. Hold on to her very tight and keep her warm.” Then I went looking for some scissors. It took ages, but eventually I found a nice woman with a knitting bag and she had scissors in that and she helped me cut Ma out of the bathing costume. We got Ma dressed, and she drove us home but she wouldn’t talk to us. She thought the world should be punished because she’d been stuck in a lime-green bathing costume.’

‘Ridiculous . . .’ breathed Kitty.

‘I know,’ said Veronica. ‘But that’s just how she was, sometimes. And we never touched Anthony’s birthday cake. Ma conveniently forgot all about it. And when he realised she wasn’t going to put candles on it or cut it or sing or anything, he sat down and ate almost the whole thing, on his own in the kitchen, then threw up in the garden.’

Kitty was silent when Veronica reached the end of this story. No doubt she was thinking how spoiled and difficult their mother had been, how half a lifetime spent in white South Africa had blinded her to her own selfish behaviour. But Veronica hoped the anecdote about the day at Swanage had driven home to Kitty the realisation that protecting Anthony was a lifelong habit which she would never be able to break.

After a moment, Kitty said: ‘I understand it. I do. It’s part of why I love you; because you’re kind. But you’ve got to tell me how long Anthony’s going to stay with us. Just tell me that.’

‘I can’t tell you. Because I don’t know. He wants to look for a house, now. He’s putting all his hopes into that. So I have to help him, don’t I?’

‘Sure. But he doesn’t have to be with us day and night. Why can’t he move to a hotel?’

Veronica turned away from Kitty angrily and punched her fist against the steering wheel of the car. ‘If you can say that,’ she said, ‘you haven’t understood one word of what I’ve been talking about!’

On the table, underneath Veronica’s garden sketches, was a pile of brochures from the estate agents in Ruasse. Veronica moved her own drawings aside and began to leaf through these. She stared at washed-out photographs of big, crumbling, stone houses attached to scant descriptions and large prices. It seemed that Cévenol property owners were bent on getting rich now, along with everybody else in the Western world.

Veronica’s eye fell onto a photograph of a tall, square mas, standing with its back to a low hill planted with holm oaks. Unlike all the others, the cement façade of this one had been painted a creamy yellow and this gave the place a kind of unexpected grandeur. The price being asked was €475,000. Veronica rubbed her eyes and began to read the details: six bedrooms, large attic space, exceptional beams, high ceilings . . .

A noise in the kitchen made her look up. Kitty was standing there, wearing the bulky, washed-out cardigan she used as a dressing gown.

She came over to where Veronica sat and bent down and put her arms round her shoulders and laid her head on hers.

‘I’m sorry,’ Kitty said. ‘I’m sorry.’

Veronica pushed aside the house details. She reached up to Kitty and they stayed like that, in an awkward hug, for a long moment.

‘I’m sorry, too,’ Veronica said at last.

‘Come to bed,’ Kitty whispered. ‘I hate being there without you.’