Trespass (28 page)

‘What stopped you?’ Veronica asked. ‘The thought of wasting a bag from Harrods?’

‘I’m serious, V. I’m serious.’

‘So am I, Anthony. If you wanted to kill yourself, then what stopped you?’

‘Not
what
’, said Anthony, ‘but
who.
A boy. Sixteen or seventeen years old. On the way home from some all-nighter, reeking of everything. And he wasn’t even a beauty, but I didn’t care. We went to Battersea Park. There are still a few places there where you can’t be seen.’

‘And if the boy hadn’t come by?’

‘I don’t know. Because why go on? I couldn’t answer it and I still can’t.
Why
?’

In the night, Veronica woke Kitty and said: ‘I’ve been resisting this. But now I’m trying to face it. I think it’s just possible that Anthony committed suicide.’

‘Yes?’ said Kitty.

‘He considered it once before. Maybe more than once. Coming to France was his last throw at his life. I believe it was. And I think he may have understood – up at that lonely house – that it wasn’t going to work . . . that everything was over.’

Kitty stroked Veronica’s hair. Then she got out of bed and went to the chest of drawers where she kept her mannish underwear. She came back to the bed and held out a crumpled piece of cellophane.

‘I found this when I went back to the Mas Lunel,’ she said.

Veronica put her glasses on and squinted at the cellophane. ‘What is it?’ she said.

‘Sandwich wrapper,’ said Kitty. ‘Cheese and tomato. From
La Bonne Baguette.
’

‘So?’

‘I could be wrong,’ said Kitty, ‘but it’s the same flavour of sandwich that Anthony chose the first time we went there with Madame Besson. And I keep wondering . . . suppose he went back . . . to have another look at the mas . . .’

Veronica stared at the cellophane, turning it over and over in her hands. At last she said: ‘We could give this to forensics. But I don’t think Anthony went back there. In fact I know he wouldn’t have. He’d made up his mind about that place. He knew the bungalow ruined it. Perhaps he thought he’d found it for a moment – his paradise – but then he saw it for what it was: not paradise at all.’

Aramon began praying to his dead mother, Bernadette.

‘Help me!’ he cried out to her. ‘
Help me, Maman . . .
’

He knew she couldn’t hear him. Or, if she did hear him, if she
did
know what was in his heart and in his mind, then she wouldn’t give him any comfort, because she’d also know that he’d long ago put himself beyond her love.

But still he kept imagining her sweet face, calm and tender beside him. She was mending the holes in his own worn-out socks. She handled the darning needle as deftly as a high-class tailor. On her feet, she wore rubber boots, flecked with farmyard mud, to which little bits of damp grass still clung.

He began ransacking the house, looking for the keys to the hidden car.

The pain in his gut made him growl when he had to reach upwards to high shelves or the tops of armoires. He found ancient blankets, bitten to threads by moths. He found Serge’s fustian wartime coat with an S.T.O. badge still pinned to the lapel. He found a rolled map of the world, on which Europe looked large and Africa small. He found a selection of shoes and coat hangers and broken lampshades and torches. He knew these things were worthless, but something prevented him from lighting a bonfire and hurling them onto it. So he left them where they were, lying around on the floor in different rooms.

In the nights, he sweated. What he dreaded most was finding the keys.

He told Bernadette that yes, yes he knew he was capable of killing a man. Human life – his own included – hadn’t been that precious to him, not after Serge died and everything had had to change, not after what
had
been precious to him was denied him for ever.

In his dreams, he killed Verey. He didn’t know why this kept happening, but it did. He shot Verey in the gut. He saw his grey colon come bursting through the flesh of his stomach. Then he rolled the body in a blanket, or in Serge’s old coat with the S.T.O. badge still pinned to it, and chucked it in the car. The body was light, almost like the body of a boy.

But when Aramon woke up from these dreams, he still didn’t know the truth about what he’d done or not done. The first words on his lips in the mornings were to his dead mother: ‘Help me, Maman, help me . . .’

Then Madame Besson phoned.

‘Monsieur Lunel,’ she said brightly, ‘
j’ai des très bonnes nouvelles
: I have another English family who would like to come and visit the mas.’

Aramon was standing in the kitchen. Five empty pastis bottles adorned the table. On the floor were piles of old farming manuals, mousetraps, broken fishing rods, blackened roasting pans and stained crockery: all the detritus he’d tugged out of cupboards in his terrified search for the keys to the car in the barn. He stared at these objects, bent down and picked up a broken rod with an unsteady hand. Outside, he could hear the mistral tormenting the trees.

‘Yes?’ he forced himself to say.

‘Would today be convenient?’ said Madame Besson. ‘The clients are in my office with me now. A Monsieur and Madame Wilson. I could bring them up to the mas at about three o’clock this afternoon.’

Now, sweat began to pour down Aramon’s forehead and down the back of his neck. It was as though he’d forgotten all about trying to sell the mas, forgotten that more strangers could arrive to poke and pry into the house – and into the barn. And now he saw that he couldn’t possibly let anyone come here until he’d got rid of the car . . .

‘Monsieur Lunel,’ repeated Madame Besson, ‘tell me if today would be convenient? I have the Wilsons right here . . .’

‘No,’ said Aramon. ‘Not today. No, I can’t . . .’

He heard Madame Besson sniff with irritation. To stop her from suggesting a different day and to stop himself from agreeing to this different day, he pressed the rod across his shoulder – like you press a stick across the shoulders of a dog when you’re training it to stay or sit – and he blurted out: ‘I’ve been meaning to call you, Madame Besson. To tell you . . . I’m not well. I’m afraid that I can’t have anybody visiting me at the moment.’

‘Oh,’ said Madame Besson. ‘I’m very sorry to hear that . . .’

‘I’m confined to my bedroom. The doctor’s ordered me to stay there.’

‘Oh,’ said Madame Besson again, ‘well that is . . . very bad luck and I send you my sympathy. Nothing too serious, I hope?’

‘Well,’ said Aramon. ‘Nobody knows. Nobody seems to know . . .’

‘I see,’ said Madame Besson, then, without a pause, she went on, ‘But I must tell you, Monsieur Lunel, that if you want a sale, then I think you should let the Wilsons come today – or tomorrow, when you may be feeling better. They have to return to England on Friday but they are really very interested to see the house. From the pictures and details, they say it sounds exactly what they’ve been looking for and they’ve been looking for more than a year now, and also, I don’t think the price will be a problem for them, so if there is any way . . . I mean, I myself could conduct them on the tour of the property.
N’est-ce pas?
I could explain about your illness. We would arrange to leave you in peace in your room . . .’

‘No,’ said Aramon. ‘No. Things have happened to me . . . You have to understand. We must set this all aside.’

‘Set it aside? What d’you mean by that?’

Aramon looked out of the window and saw yellow leaves flying in the wind, as though autumn were already arriving. He thought of them falling on his parents’ stone mausoleum and settling there.

‘Cancel the sale,’ he said. ‘I can’t go on with it at the moment.’

When Audrun came up to the house the next day, she told him he’d done right.

‘Your only hope,’ she said, ‘is to keep everybody away from here, Aramon. Barricade yourself in. Lie low. Wait till it’s all forgotten. All you need to do is get rid of the car.’

He told her he’d been searching for the car keys night and day. He said, ‘I swear, I go walking around the house, searching for them in my sleep . . . but I can’t find them.’

‘Did you look in the chest,’ asked Audrun, ‘where the old family papers are?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Aramon. ‘I don’t know where I looked and where I didn’t look.’

She took hold of his thin wrist and led him into the salon. She opened the shutters, closed against the midday heat, to let light into the room and she and Aramon knelt down by the chest, side by side.

Very quickly, they came across photographs of Bernadette, and Aramon’s agitation seemed to be stilled by looking at these. One black-and-white picture was of Bernadette leading on a rope the donkey who had eventually died in the byre. Both she and the donkey, Audrun noticed, looked skinny, almost starved, and she said to herself that that was the condition you had to bear in the hills of the Cévennes in the middle of the twentieth century: you had to endure hunger. And then she remembered that she herself had endured it as a child and that this had been all right, just part of each day, each week, each month, and it was only the things that had come later that had been unendurable.

After a few moments of lifting out bundles of letters and newspapers, Audrun said: ‘You know, we should really go through all these family papers properly. There could be important things in here.’

‘Important once maybe,’ said Aramon. ‘But everybody’s dead now. All the news is dead news . . .’

‘And the letters?’

Aramon rubbed his eyes. ‘Words,’ he said. ‘Just words.’

Audrun picked up a letter in Serge’s handwriting and read aloud: ‘
My dearest wife, terrible bitter cold these nights and praying it may be kinder at La Callune for yourself and our beloved son, Aramon, and the little girl . . .
’

‘
Beloved son?
’ said Aramon. ‘Did he say that?’

Audrun passed him the letter. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Look.’

He fumbled with his spectacles and began reading. He held himself very still. Audrun saw tears begin to slide down the furrows in his cheeks.

‘Aramon,’ she said gently. ‘When you die, who inherits the mas?’

‘You do,’ he said. ‘It’s the law. You’re my only next of kin left alive. So you get it all – if it’s not sold, and if you’re still breathing.’

He looked at her kneeling by his side, seeming not to mind that she could see his face all drenched with his sorrow. ‘Clean it up, you could,’ he said with a hint of a smile. ‘Eh, Audrun? Even get your old flame Molezon over to have a proper look at that crack.
N’est-ce pas?
If he can still haul his arse up a ladder.’

She nodded slowly.

Aramon put the letter from Serge aside, and began sifting through the papers remaining in the chest. Then he straightened up.

‘The keys aren’t in here,’ he said. ‘I would have remembered putting them in with all this family junk.’

Kitty lay in a hammock under a sickle moon. She stared up at this blade of moon and at the shrapnel of the stars scattered far and wide.

‘Heartless!’ her mother used to say, glancing up at the darkness above Cromer. ‘Never expect consolation from the night sky.’

Kitty made the hammock sway gently. Her head rested on a striped cushion and she’d covered her body with a thin blanket. The garden all around her was almost silent. Now and then, there was a scratch of sound from the cicadas and the scoop-owl let out its anxious exclamation:
‘Oh-ooo, oh-ooo!’
But the mistral had died down. The branches of the two cherry trees, where the hammock was suspended, didn’t move. No sound came from the house.

Kitty preferred to spend her nights out here now. It was all right to be alone, alone in the darkness, alone in her own little mind. Because she had to hang on to that. She had to hang on to being Kitty Meadows, fifty-eight years old, watercolorist, photographer, lover of women. She had to remind herself that she
was,
she existed, she would go forward into some kind of future, nobody had taken her life.