Trespass (19 page)

Monsieur Dalbert wasn’t interested in memory. He was interested in certainty. He said he didn’t wish to contradict her in an impolite manner, but there would certainly be boundary markers indicating where her ground ended and Aramon’s began. The commune of La Callune would have insisted upon these when permission to build her house had been granted.

Out of her kitchen window, she watched him toiling in the afternoon heat. Sun rays bounced off his bald head. He was a small man, but full of petty cruelty, she could tell, proud of his ability to wound. Audrun crumbled some black earth from the geranium pot on her kitchen window sill and threw it in with the ground coffee because she knew this could have the power to quell her anxiety, to watch the surveyor imbibing geranium compost and never knowing it.

She set the tray of coffee things on the terrace table and waited. The dogs in the pound at the Mas Lunel were braying, scenting the stranger, even at this distance. And no doubt Aramon would be smiling up there in the detritus of his life, smiling as he drank, thinking: Now the last reckoning is about to arrive, the one that chucks Audrun out into the arms of Mother Nature, ha! The one that leaves her with nothing except her sainted forest.

Black earth in the coffee; under the floors, the bones of a dead animal, the mossy stones of the fallen byre . . . If these peculiarities could coexist in time, then other more exceptional things could . . . could what? Well . . . they could suddenly
happen
. For who had imagined that Marilyn Monroe would die like
that
, with her poo-poopy-doo soul fluttering out of her arse while a washing machine turned, while people came and went from her house on Fifth Helena Drive, Brentwood, California, USA in the small hours? But that was the way it was. Apparently.

Back and forth Audrun watched him go, the bald surveyor, staring at the driveway, consulting his bulky papers, laying down his steel measure, straightening up, catapulting the measure back into its housing, searching among weeds and nettles. Back and forth, treading everything down.

Then he strutted back and climbed the three steps to the terrace where Audrun waited and plonked the sheaf of builder’s plans on the table. With a jabbing finger, he located the boundary markers on the stiff paper: ‘Here, here, here and here.’

Audrun stared at him.

‘I can’t find them,’ Monsieur Dalbert said, wiping sweat from his forehead. ‘The markers have either been illegally cut or removed from the ground.’

Audrun said in her mind: I told you. There weren’t any boundaries.

‘They should not be touched,
ever
,’ said Monsieur Dalbert. ‘Boundary markers are the property of the commune. Did you know that it is a felony to remove them?’

Felony
.
A thrilling word.

Audrun wanted to remark how numberless, how diverse might be the crimes to which the word could apply. But there was something in the air, in her breath, in her lungs – a heaviness – which made speaking difficult on this late afternoon.

The surveyor surveyed her over his spectacles. (Another one who considered her mad, no doubt, told by Aramon that she couldn’t distinguish north from south, had no idea where one thing began and another ended.) She decided that now she would pour out the coffee, soured with earth, but she found that her arm just stayed where it was, by her side. The surveyor shook his head in an exasperated way, as though the coffee mixed with its little sugaring of compost might have been the thing that had brought him here and now he saw that he wasn’t going to get any.

The dogs kept up their whining, their yelping for liberty, for meat, for blood. And Audrun watched Monsieur Dalbert turn his head in the direction of these wild hounds and felt in him a sudden welling-up of anxiety. Yes,
felt it
. As though, for a particle of time, infinitely small, she’d left her own body to inhabit the air this stranger was breathing . . .

. . . and this stepping away, this parting from her
self
, it was as familiar to her as the sound of her heart when she lay in her bed in the darkness. She knew that it signified something – something which wasn’t meant to happen any more, but which did happen never the less.

Words. Who knew when they were right ones? Who knew?

Now, he’s staring at her, terrified, the man whose name she’s already forgotten. He’s nothing but this terrified stare, very close to her, with his mouth moving, as though speaking or trying to speak, but all sound has vanished. And then it comes swooping down on Audrun: the void.

She woke on the floor of her sitting room, covered by her green eiderdown. Marianne Viala was kneeling by her, holding her hand. Somewhere, just out of sight, was another person, waiting, waiting for time to move on.

In a voice that sounded choked and small, Audrun whispered to Marianne: ‘Bernadette used to say that if you live in the south . . . so far south as this, where the mistral blows . . . then events just . . . they just . . .’

‘Hush,’ said Marianne.

‘She used to say . . . you don’t mould things to your will.’

‘Hush,’ said Marianne again. ‘Have a sip of water.’

Later, she woke in her bed. Her warm little bedside light was on, and this was a comforting thing for which she felt grateful. She knew that something had happened because she felt cold and weak. But what?

She looked around, above the bedclothes, to see whether she was alone. She felt something acrid come in through her nose, an air that was perfumed with some kind of alteration.

‘Well,’ said a voice, ‘you woke up at last.’

So, Aramon was there. Skinny arse on a hard chair. Cigarette in his hand.

‘What happened?’ she asked him.

‘What d’you think happened? You had one of your fits. You did it on purpose, this time. Didn’t you?’

She felt hungry. She wanted to say to him: Make me a broth, with vegetables and marrowbones, like Bernadette used to make when we were children. Lift me up and gently spoon the broth into my mouth, with a hand that’s steady and kind. But she refused to ask him to do anything for her. Far better to endure hunger or even thirst than to ask Aramon for any favours.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Here.’

He stubbed out his cigarette. He bent over her so that he could help her up a little in the bed. She had to close her eyes, because his face so near to hers was a terrible thing to see. She lay back against the pillows. Aramon handed her a glass, half full of water, and she drank. And then he turned away and she saw him standing with his back to her, staring at her room.

‘It was never up to much, this place,’ he said. ‘Was it?’

She drank the water, which was tepid. She understood that she was wearing her flowered overall over a blue blouse, but that there didn’t seem to be any skirt underneath the overall. She could feel her naked legs touching the sheet. Aramon turned and sat down on the hard chair near the bed. He drew in his breath and let it out again in a long sigh. ‘Demolish it in an afternoon, you could,’ he said. ‘Walls no thicker than a loaf of bread.’

Audrun tried to think her way back into the day that was passing or had already passed. She believed that she remembered Marianne arriving with one of her famous
tartes au chocolat,
but she couldn’t recall whether they’d eaten any of it or not, or whether, even, that had been on a different day.

It felt to Audrun as though she hadn’t put anything into her stomach for a long time. And now, through the open curtains, she could see that it was night.

‘The thing is,’ said Aramon. ‘We know where we stand, now. Eh? The survey makes it clear.’

He seemed to be waiting for her to speak, but she couldn’t find anything to say because she didn’t know what he was talking about.

‘I’m calling those agents tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Tell them to send the English buyer back. If he knows this little dump will soon be gone, he’ll pay my price. Then we can all begin again.’

This thought went whispering round the shadowy room. Audrun could hear the wind rising, trying to drown it out. Her longing for the marrowbone broth was a raging thing now, she felt so starved of anything good. Aramon lit another cigarette and said: ‘Marianne says you can live with her for a bit. I think that’s pretty decent of her, don’t you? But I don’t suppose you can stay there for ever. You have to decide, Audrun: d’you want to build a place in your wood? Or sell up? With what you’d get for the woodland, you might be able to afford an apartment in Ruasse.’

At the age of eleven, Anthony was sent away from Hampshire to a boarding school in Sussex. Ever since that day, he’d had difficulty falling asleep at night.

‘Verey!’ his housemaster, Mr Perkins (known by the boys as ‘Polly’), often snapped at morning roll-call outside the refectory. ‘You look half dead. Straighten up, boy!’

Anthony had tried to tell Polly that he’d forgotten the trick of how to fall asleep, a trick apparently taken for granted by all the other boys in the dormitory. He watched and heard them perform it, one by one. They turned over and folded their arms around their pillows, or let their elbows lie across their faces, and in moments – in
seconds –
the trick seemed to be accomplished and they sounded blithe in their rest. But he, Anthony, lay in the not-quite-darkness, listening to all the rhythmical breathing and sighing, envying the sleepers with his whole being, longing to cross over to where they’d gone, but unable to do so. Sometimes, he fell asleep just as it got light, or moments before the morning alarm bell sounded at five to seven, or not at all.

Over the years, Anthony had devised hundreds of different ways of trying to soothe himself into unconsciousness, but this never-ending management of sleep felt to him like some kind of unjust punishment, some miserable penance which, if Lal hadn’t sent him away to boarding school, he would never have had to pay.

He sometimes thought that, if his mother were suddenly returned to life, there would be a few things he’d have to berate her for. He’d do it lovingly, of course. He’d hold her hand in his or he’d place her feet gently on his lap and massage them with his long, sensitive fingers, but he’d nevertheless remind her that quite frequently, along the shortish thing that had been her life, she’d committed crimes of thoughtlessness.

Now, in Veronica’s spare room after a late return from the Sardis’ dinner party, Anthony endured it yet again, that old torturing wakefulness, for which there was never any sure remedy. The sleigh bed felt hard and cramped. Anthony’s head ached from drinking too much champagne.

He had a thirst which water didn’t seem able to quench.

Images of the beautiful boy, Nicolas, hovered at the edges of his mind. He had an extraordinary longing – not experienced for months – to hold someone,
this
someone, in his arms, and he didn’t want to let this feeling evaporate.

He touched himself. He seldom strayed into the traps and delusions of the auto-erotic. This arena depressed him, as though it returned him always and inevitably to the grubbiness of the boarding-school dormitory. But now, Anthony closed his eyes and imagined himself with Nicolas in a spacious hotel suite, in New York City, where the bed was soft and wide and the drapes at the windows heavy and thick. The New York traffic growled and shimmered outside in the street. France and England felt so far away, it was as if there might be no return to either of these places. Nicolas kissed him. The excitement Anthony already felt was intense and it thrilled him to feel such urgent desire once again. He’d been dead, dead in his body for so long, but now he was alive. He laid the precocious boy across the big bed. His young body was tanned and slim and strong. Anthony slowly removed his own clothes, never taking his eyes from Nicolas. The boy held out one arm.

Naked now and not one bit embarrassed by his ageing nakedness, Anthony climbed onto the bed and kissed Nicolas again and then straddled him and knelt above his face. He didn’t want to hurt or damage any part of such a dazzling being. Beauty like this had to be respected. All he did was touch the boy’s sensual, rosy mouth with his thumb and then Nicolas lifted himself up and Anthony imagined the mouth yearning, open now, like the mouth of an infant yearning for the teat, and it fastened round his cock and began lapping, and in not more than thirty seconds the divine mouth brought him off.

Afterwards, he lay very still. He felt as tired as a long-distance runner.

He slept and dreamed of Lal’s dying. It unravelled in the dream exactly as it had been.

Veronica was away in Italy, on some expensive garden design course, when Lal had at last owned up to her cancer. Lal hadn’t wanted her oh-so-healthy daughter alerted. She said she was having what she called ‘a little bout of sickness’, but promised she would be well again by the time Veronica got back.

Lal was taken to a hospital in Andover. On the morning of her third day in a blank little private room, with her name, Mrs Raymond Verey, on a card next to the door, Anthony had driven down from London to visit her.