Trespass (13 page)

Whenever a car stopped on the road, now, Audrun thought it would belong to the surveyor. ‘He’s coming any day,’ Aramon had told her. ‘Then we’ll see how much of my land you’ve taken! Then, we’ll know, ha!’

She stood at her window, waiting.

She saw Aramon walk out early one morning, going towards the neglected vine terraces, bent low by the weight of the metal weed-killer canister strapped to his back. He’d told her that the estate agents had advised him to clean up the terraces, that the kind of purchasers interested in the Mas Lunel would also be seduced by the idea of growing grapes. ‘I can’t see it myself,’ he’d scoffed. ‘Bossy cunts of agents know nothing about vines! But
I
know. I know how they break your back. No lazy town-dwelling Belgian or Englishman would put in the work. But who cares? I’ll do as I’m told. For 475,000 euro, I’ll be as obedient as a whore.’

Audrun followed him, unseen, down to the terraces. She stared at the rows and rows of vines, all unpruned, with the skeins of last year’s growth still tangled round them and all the stony earth that nourished them choked with grass and weeds. Standing in the shadow of some ilex scrub, she watched Aramon working half-heartedly with his secateurs, snipping a few cuttings, then stopping and lighting a cigarette. He stood there smoking, with his nervous, inebriated glance jumping here and there in the bright light and the canister of weed-killer abandoned in the long grass.

Audrun looked at him with her eyes narrowed and hard. She was trying to decide how best to kill him.

She went up to the Mas Lunel and began searching for his will.

He’d never married or fathered any children, so everything would be hers if he died before her, unless he’d contrived to will part of it away to one of his old hunting friends. And she doubted that he’d got round to this, ever made the necessary burdensome visits to a notary, but she needed to be sure. If he’d made a new testament just to spite her, he would have hidden a copy somewhere.

She went first to an old mahogany chest in the salon, the most comfortable room in the mas, but where Aramon hardly ever lingered, as though he recognised that the space was too grand for him – for the person he was in his core.

Bernadette had always kept the family Bible in this chest. Over all the years, this Bible had exerted its holy magnetism upon everything that seemed to plead its own bureaucratic importance or sentimental preciousness, such as the letters Serge had written from the Ardennes during the war, then from Alsace, where he was repatriated after France’s surrender, and then during his time spent working for the
Service de Travail Obligatoire
at Ruasse.

There were large heaps of these letters in Serge’s untidy writing, unread for years. There were also ancient identity cards, bills of sale to the wine co-operative, invitations to marriages, christenings and first communions, mourning-cards, family photographs, newspaper cuttings, letters of condolence, edicts from the mayor, a faded menu from a cheap Paris restaurant in Les Halles . . . All of these things had flung themselves in to be with the Gospels.

Audrun opened the chest and took out the Bible. She held it to her face for a moment, picking up – even now – the scent of her mother embedded in its cloth covers, then laid it aside. She stared at the heap of papers, sprinkled with woodworm dust, finer than fine-grained sand. This dust suggested to her that the papers hadn’t been disturbed for a long while. Aramon never looked at the past, then, and no wonder. He was afraid to catch sight of himself in it.

Audrun lifted out an armful of letters, cards and photographs. One photograph, of Bernadette, fell out of the pile and Audrun stared down at her mother’s face – that sweetest of sweet countenances – as it had once been, when she was young and smiling at the old box camera in the sunshine. How beautiful Bernadette had been! Her hair was parted at the side and swept up into a tortoiseshell clip. Her eyes were wide and sleepy. Her skin was smooth and unblemished. She wore a striped blouse that Audrun couldn’t recall.

Audrun put the photograph into the pocket of the old red cardigan she was wearing that day. She returned to the chest. Again, the arrangement of the remaining papers indicated neglect. But it was still possible that Aramon had made his will and layered it silently in, deep down in the complicated
mille-feuille
of what passed for a family archive.

She sifted and sorted, looking for a document that would probably be whiter than the rest, with dark printing. But she found nothing. Reaching the bottom of the chest, Audrun picked up a picture postcard of the river at Ruasse, with the water almost overflowing the banks and washing against the old market stalls that had once stood there and all the patient cart horses waiting in a line. The message, written by her father and dated 1944 read:

Audrun laid the card back in. Arranged everything as she’d found it.

She put the Bible away and closed the chest. She didn’t want to think about her father.

She stood up and looked around. Where else was she going to search?

She made her way up to Aramon’s bedroom. The window was wide open, freshening the foetid air. Audrun knelt by the bed and ran her hands under the mattress. She tugged out a clutch of magazines of the kind she was expecting to find and as she looked at them she thought that his death should be the right death, the one he’d deserved, and it should not be quick and it should not be painless.

Audrun shoved the pornography back under the heavy mattress. Circling round to examine the other side of the bed, she remembered that there were always bottles and blister-packs of pills on Aramon’s night table, and she returned to these. She fumbled for her spectacles and put them on. She stared at the neat pharmaceutical labels, none of which she recognised, but she supposed they were sleeping tablets or anti-depressant tablets or some other oblivion-inducing drugs.

And so she wondered . . . might it be as easy as that, to get him more drunk than he knew and cram pills into his mouth or mash them up and let him swig them down himself with his wine and whisky, and be taken for a suicide?

Or better still, lie him face down on the bed and get out his enema paraphernalia and pump the poison into him that way. For hadn’t she read in some magazine that Marilyn Monroe had died like this, from having a river of barbiturates squirted into her colon? And yet, at the time, everyone had believed she’d died by swallowing pills, that she wanted to die, that her life had become unbearable . . . and what nobody had revealed until years and years later was that there was no residue of an overdose in her stomach. None. But still the verdict of suicide had been returned.

Audrun imagined the two scenes, Marilyn’s death, past and gone, and Aramon’s death, yet to come. She could envisage the softness and beauty of Marilyn’s arse, her languid sleeping defenceless body, and the rough panicky gestures of the assassins, shoving and pumping. They made a mess of it, so the magazine article said. The sheets had to be washed in the middle of the night.
Imagine that.
As the pale, famous woman lay dying, as the dawn crept nearer and nearer, the drum of some old American washing machine kept turning . . .

If she, Audrun, was going to kill Aramon this way, she couldn’t afford to mess it up like that. Despite the disgust she’d feel, having to touch and smell his arse, to guide the enema tube inside him, she’d have to do it carefully, like a surgeon, wearing protective gloves, and leave no trace of herself behind. No trace.

And she thought that once she’d got the tube inside him, then it might be extraordinary, it might be almost
beautiful
to begin squeezing the bag of fluid, to feel the venom’s ejaculation from the tube, feel its infusion into his body.

When she’d filled him up with it, when the fluid bag was empty and he lay unconscious there, she’d take the tube out very carefully and replace it with a cork, an ordinary wine cork, dampened and made soft. Then, she’d bind his arse with rags, to stop the cork from popping out and letting the poison escape. How hilarious, how wonderfully right, to bind him up like that, to stop anything coming out of him! And then there would be nothing more to do; she’d simply wait. And it would certainly be beautiful – that silent waiting, that solitary waiting until he died.

She was back in her bed now.
Safe in her bed.
With the sighing of the wind in her wood to comfort her. She’d found no will.

By the yellowish light of an old parchment-shaded lamp, she stared at the photograph of Bernadette. She whispered to Bernadette that she wasn’t afraid of the surveyor now – now that she’d decided to kill Aramon. They could come and knock her house down and she wouldn’t care, because soon Aramon was going to be in the ground and she would install herself at the Mas Lunel, in Bernadette’s bed, made clean and sane once more with a new mattress and crisp new cotton sheets . . .

She turned the photograph over, to see whether there was a date on it.

And she found these words:
Renée. Mas Lunel. 1941.

Renée.
They never talked about her. Never. Not even Serge talked about her. Except just one time. One time. When he made her his excuse for everything that was going to happen next . . .

Audrun put the photograph face down on her night table.

Less than a year after this photograph had been taken, Renée was dead. Killed by German soldiers in reprisals against the first feats of the
maquisards
at Pont Perdu.

And so Audrun had dared to ask her father, ‘What was Renée doing at Pont Perdu?’

He’d sighed and shifted on his chair. ‘She was just there that day,
ma fille
.’

‘Why? We don’t know anybody at Pont Perdu?’

He looked as sad as a mule, with his greying head hanging down, and Audrun had felt sorrowful for him and gone to stand close to him, and then regretted that she had.

He’d rubbed his eyes. ‘Women,’ he said. ‘You have to control them – day and night, day and night. Or they get the better of you. But I wasn’t there. I was in Alsace. I couldn’t control anything. I was trapped by the war.’

Renée was in her grave by the time he got home. She’d been his fiancée, the most beautiful girl in La Callune, but she was slaughtered before he could begin his life with her. Perhaps she’d betrayed him with a lover at Pont Perdu, but nobody ever talked about it, one way or another. Serge Lunel let a few months pass and then he married her identical twin sister, Bernadette.

‘
Continuity
,’ Serge had said, with his grey-flecked head in its attitude of sorrow and his hands twisting in his lap. ‘That’s what a man needs. It’s what he aches for in this shit-hole of a life. And I ache as badly as the next bastard.’

Anthony sat alone at the marble-topped table on Veronica’s terrace, staring at details of properties for sale in the Cévennes, given to him by the agents in Ruasse. Above him, in the Spanish mulberry tree, a gathering of sparrows came and went with twigs and pieces of straw for their nests.

The photographs printed on the agents’ details were maddeningly unsharp. They also had a greenish-blue tinge to them, as though they’d already begun to fade – from languishing in a filing cabinet or from being shoved into a too-bright display window. In most of the pictures, the sky behind the houses wasn’t blue, but grey. It looked almost as if a silent, invisible English rain were falling.

Anthony took off his glasses, polished them with his handkerchief, put them on again and returned to the pictures. He thought about the care he always lavished on photographs of his
beloveds
for advertisements in the high-end glossy magazines, making sure that the light was such that patina and texture, detail and colour were all exquisitely, irresistibly captured. In contrast to this, these pictures – aimed at buyers willing to part with more than half a million euros – had been hastily, clumsily taken. And not one of the properties bore any resemblance to the house Anthony saw in his mind. In fact, they frightened him. Although he reminded himself that the gap between an idea and its realisation was sometimes so large that the only human response could be a low cry of despair, he felt this cry rise up in him so strongly, so almost audibly, that he choked and became short of breath.

He was about to walk into the house and dump all the brochures in Veronica’s paper-recycling box when Kitty Meadows came out onto the terrace and sat down, uninvited, opposite him.