Trespass (16 page)

‘Audrun owns a whole wood!’ Lunel burst out. ‘I told her to build there, in her damned wood. That’s where the house should have gone. And instead it went on my land.’

‘Are you saying that your sister’s house is, in fact, on your land, Monsieur Lunel?’ said Madame Besson.

‘Yes, it’s on part of my land . . . part of it . . .’

‘Ah. That was not made clear to me. According to the plans I’ve seen—’

‘I’m getting a new surveyor!’ said Aramon Lunel, banging his fist on the table. ‘Those boundaries are all wrong and Audrun knows it!’

Madame Besson took a notebook out of her handbag and began to write in it. Anthony saw sweat begin to bead at Lunel’s temple. His clenched fist was shaking. ‘I’ve told Audrun,’ he said to Madame Besson, ‘she’s in breach of the rules. We’re just waiting for the surveyor to come and sort it all out.’

‘I think you should have informed us, as agents, about this . . . family dispute, Monsieur Lunel,’ said Madame Besson. ‘I can’t continue to show people round the property while there’s uncertainty about boundary lines.’

‘No, no!’ cried Lunel. ‘There is no uncertainty. There is no “dispute”. You’ll see! It’s all going to be sorted out. Just as soon as I can persuade the surveyor at Ruasse to get off his arse . . .’

Madame Besson got up and made a sign to the others to do the same. Lunel clutched at Madame Besson’s sleeve. ‘Don’t go!’ he implored. ‘I like these buyers. The
Britanniques
have money. They haven’t finished their tea. Let me show them the vines . . .’

‘No, I’m sorry, we have to go,’ said Madame Besson, pulling her arm away and consulting her watch. ‘We have an appointment to see a house at Saint-Bertrand.’

Audrun was cutting her grass with her small petrol mower when Aramon came limping down the driveway and began shouting at her. She manoeuvred the mower towards him, thinking how extraordinary it would be to run over his feet.

‘Turn it off! Turn it off!’ he yelled.

But she let it idle near her, like a weapon primed and ready.

He was drunk on pastis. His gaze looped and swivelled all around him. The sun beat down on his wild head.

‘I’ve got a buyer!’ he babbled. ‘It’s eighty per cent sure. Ninety per cent sure. An English buyer, some dealer in antiques, stuffed with cash. But he’s hesitating, damn him! He’s hesitating because he wants your bungalow gone, and I’ve told the agents it
will
be gone!’

‘You’ve told the agents—’

‘I’m not letting this sale go. It’s my due. It’s my right,
pardi
!’

Audrun said nothing. She held onto the mower handle. She could imagine the blood and tissue and bone from his feet exploding in a fountain over the grass, the colour of the pink lake in her dreams. Aramon lurched nearer to her. ‘Surveyor’s coming tomorrow,’ he said, shaking a finger at her, almost in her face. ‘And I’ve told him, your house is illegal!’

‘Leave me alone, Aramon,’ she said.

‘Didn’t you hear me? Surveyor’s coming in the morning. And by next week, there’ll be a demolition order on your bungalow. And I’ve told those stupid agents, I’m taking care of it. I’ve told them—’

He was sick then. He convulsed and spewed up on her cut lawn, clutching his gut. Audrun had to look away, the sight was so repellent, it made her retch. And she thought about where she’d bury him once she’d killed him; not in the family vault at La Callune, where their parents lay, but in some unsanctified place, some unvisited slope of land, among the thorny gorse. And birds of prey would come, smelling his terrible flesh, and pick him clean, as he’d never been clean in his adult life. And all of this was only a matter of time.

She turned her back on him and resumed her mowing, going in wider circles now, without looking in his direction. The scent of the mown grass gradually replaced the stink of his vomit. And after a while, Audrun knew that he’d walked away, going shakily along the drive towards the Mas Lunel. She imagined him crawling up the stairs to his room and collapsing onto his bed. He should have been working on his vines, but he’d be snoring in his pit, with daylight flooding the walls, and she began to wonder, would this be a good time to do the things she had to do . . . ?

She’d seen the English people, heard the sound of their voices, peculiarly loud. And the smaller of the two women had come a little way down the drive and stared at the bungalow. Audrun had watched her from behind her lace curtains. The woman resembled a man. She was short, but she walked with a swagger. And the swagger had made Audrun feel strange, as though this person had mystical power.

She found herself wondering, had Jesus of Nazareth walked along the shore towards the fishermen in this swaggering kind of way, when He summoned His disciples and they’d risen up from their boats and left their nets and all that they’d worked for, to follow Him there and then? Audrun knew this was an inappropriate kind of idea, a blasphemy, exactly the kind of thought which made ordinary people believe she was crazy. But nobody seemed to understand that thoughts couldn’t always be chosen. This was one of the confusing things about Audrun’s life:
thoughts chose her.
And not only thoughts. She was a vessel, a receptacle for unimaginably terrible actions. And this was what she lived with: the fact that, sometimes, the unimaginable became real in her: only in her.

She sat in her chair, resting after her mowing. She asked herself how long it would take her to snatch Aramon’s pills, grind them up and dissolve them in warm water and fill the enema bag and go silently back to his room. Would he wake up too soon, and begin struggling with her? Or would she, even as she worked with the fluid and the tube, be able to calm and reassure him, tell him she was trying to do him good with a special kind of purge that would flush the sickness out of him? And then he would submit. He would submit to his own death . . .

Audrun closed her eyes. Once, when they were children, before Bernadette had left them to lie in the cemetery at La Callune, Aramon had fallen out of an apricot tree on one of the far terraces, and she, his ten-year-old sister, had heard him screaming and found him in a swoon of pain and tried to soothe him and calm him as he writhed on the ground with his ankle broken.

She’d attempted to pick him up and carry him, but the weight of him was too great and she had had to lay him down on a mush of fallen apricots and dry leaves. She told him she was going to run and fetch Bernadette or Serge, but Aramon clung to her. He was thirteen and afraid and he said: ‘Don’t leave me out here. Don’t leave me alone, Audrun . . .’

So she laid his head in her lap and stroked his face and tried to calm him and after a while he was quiet and fell into a kind of trance. She sat there, on the mushy ground, tormented by wasps, holding him and waiting. Not daring to cry out for help, in case she broke his peculiar sleep, proud of the way she’d been able to bring this sleep about.

And only later, after Serge had found them as the light was fading, was she told that she’d done wrong, that Aramon could have died of shock out there on the lower terraces, that she should have covered him with her own coat and run immediately for help. In the night, she heard her father say to Bernadette: ‘That daughter of yours has no sense. She doesn’t do what’s right. God knows what kind of life she’s going to have.’

And now, it could go wrong again, that thing she called her life. If she did what she wanted to do, what she knew she
had to do
, wasn’t she afterwards guaranteed a miserable end? Because prison would feel like dying, just as working in the underwear factory at Ruasse had felt like dying. She’d spend her days trudging between a freezing cell and some noisy, echoing room, where women laughed and screamed like demons as they went about their ugly work. In this place, her eyesight would surely fail. Her
episodes
would increase, until they joined one to another in a skein of unpronounceable suffering and confusion. And in the nights, she’d be haunted by dreams about her wood, knowing that she’d never see it again, never hear its sighing, never see the glad spring, but only imagine the seasons passing and flying on . . .

Audrun sat on in her chair and the evening darkness slowly visited the room. She realised now that she didn’t have it yet, the plan that would accomplish its end and leave no trace. She pulled her cardigan round her. Then she thought: I don’t have it yet, but it
will
come. It will arrive in me, unbidden, like a stranger with a swagger arriving at the door. And I will rise up and follow it.

She got up early and drank her bowl of coffee and put on her flowery overall and began to tidy her house for the surveyor’s visit. She dragged a mop over the tiled floors, watching the pathways of shine its dampness made and wishing that this glimmer wouldn’t fade, the way it always did.

She knew the bungalow was a dump, botched together under its tin roof, but now that she was probably going to lose it she felt her sentimental attachment to it increase. It contained all there was of her: her bed, her armoire, her plants, her television, her stove, her rugs, her favourite chair. The walls had sheltered her, kept her pain in one place.

The morning was bright and still. Audrun watered the geraniums on her terrace, pulled up two white onions for her supper, chased a green frog away. As the frog disappeared into the grass, Audrun saw Marianne Viala walking up the road towards her.

‘The surveyor’s coming this morning,’ she told Marianne.

Marianne had brought her a piece of her famous
tarte au chocolat
on a blue plate. She set this down on the plastic table. She shook her head that appeared small, with its tightly permed curls, coloured pale brown. ‘Aramon should be ashamed of himself,’ she said.

They sat down in the plastic chairs, with the
tarte
between them, uneaten. Whenever a car came by on the road, they turned and stared, wondering if it was going to be the surveyor arriving. After a while, Marianne said: ‘If your brother knocks your house down, you can come and live with me.’

Audrun was silent. She knew this was very kind of Marianne, exceptionally kind – if she really meant it – but it wasn’t a thing she could contemplate. She’d lived her whole life here, on land that had belonged to the Lunel family for three generations. To find herself in some little shadowy back-room, surrounded by Marianne’s possessions, would be terrible. She lifted her head and said: ‘I think I’ll go and live at the mas.’

‘What,’ said Marianne, ‘with
him
?’

Audrun looked down at her hands, clenched together on the table top.

‘The way he’s drinking,’ she said, ‘he can’t have long to live.’

After an hour had passed, Audrun made more coffee and the two women ate the chocolate
tarte
and they felt the sweetness of it bring their blood alive. And they started on some reminiscences of their schooldays and among these was a memory of how their teacher, Monsieur Verdier, used to bring his mongrel dog, Toto, to Thursday classes because his wife worked in the village shop on that day of the week and Toto was a creature who couldn’t bear to be alone.

At break time, Toto would be let out into the school yard with the children and they hugged him and petted him and pulled his ears and fed him sweets and chased him round and round, and some of the older boys threw sticks at him but he kept scampering on.

Then, one Thursday, Toto wasn’t there in his basket in the classroom, and Monsieur Verdier set the children a reading assignment and sat at his desk without moving, staring out of the window at the sky.

‘Please, sir,’ one of the children asked. ‘Where’s Toto?’

‘Toto’s disappeared,’ said Monsieur Verdier. ‘We don’t know where. We just hope he’s not alone.’

‘Did he ever come back?’ asked Marianne. ‘I can’t remember.’

‘No,’ said Audrun. ‘He never came back. The things you love never do.’

Marianne sniffed, as if to say that, really, Audrun’s pessimism was wearisome sometimes, and she changed the subject to her daughter, Jeanne, who was a teacher, now, at a school in Ruasse. ‘The children there,’ said Marianne, ‘are far less disciplined than we were. Far less – in the city schools. Jeanne has terrible difficulty. And she told me in her class this term she’s got a child from Paris, who’s getting bullied.’

‘Well,’ said Audrun. ‘That’s not new. Bullying.’

‘No. But it’s hard for Jeanne. She has to try to be fair to everyone. She hates it when any of them are unhappy, but she says this little girl has been very spoilt. Her father’s a doctor, or something like that.’

‘What’s her name?’ asked Audrun. ‘In Paris, they give children the names of movie stars, American names.’

‘Yes,’ said Marianne. ‘Her name’s Mélodie.
Mélodie.
Imagine calling a child that! And of course it makes another difficulty for Jeanne.’

The morning went by and Marianne returned to her house, and there was no sign of the surveyor.

‘If you’re a woman,’ Bernadette once said to Audrun, ‘you spend a lot of your life waiting. You wait for the men to come back from the war, or from the fields, or from hunting in the hills. You wait for them to decide to mend all the things that need mending. You wait for their words of love.’