Trespass (29 page)

But she wanted to leave Les Glaniques. She now wanted to leave the place where she’d been happier than anywhere in her life. Leave before her life
was
taken. Because to be cast out as she was from Veronica’s love was killing her. Every day, Kitty felt smaller, more ugly, more useless. And she could envisage no end to this. Unless, by some miracle, Anthony Verey was returned to Les Glaniques, returned to his sister . . .

Kitty didn’t mind much where she went. She decided she would buy a plane ticket to some destination she’d never imagined visiting: Fiji, Mumbai, Cape Town, Havana, Nashville Tennessee . . . She lulled herself to sleep picturing these places, seeing Fijian war dances, hearing country songs.

But her sleep was strange, as though it didn’t quite happen except in short, vivid dreams, and when the sky grew light Kitty just felt surprised that a piece of time had passed without her noticing it.

She lay still in her hammock and looked out at the parched condition of the garden. Birds came down from their night roosts to peck for worms in the grass, but the grass was full of dust and on it was a carpeting of brown cherry leaves, already falling. The lavender flowers, where a few bees still came to search for nectar, had lost all their colour. Leaf-moth was attacking the bays and the laurels, making the leaves blister and curl. Oleander blooms withered and fell.

The well was almost dry. The mayors of all the surrounding villages had agreed together on a hose ban. Vegetables could be watered; nothing else. Not even the dying fruit trees.

‘The saddest thing,’ Kitty had said to Veronica, ‘would be to lose the apricots, wouldn’t it?’

‘No,’ said Veronica. ‘There’s only one sad thing. Nothing else feels important to me. Not even the garden.’

Kitty, for once, had pressed on. She’d evoked for Veronica their first summer at Les Glaniques, when they were still discovering what flourished and what died in the garden. And when the apricot trees fruited, they’d found they had the sweetest, most abundant crop they could ever have imagined. They gorged on the juicy, pink-blushed apricots. They made jam and pies and glazed tartlets. Feeding apricots to Kitty in bed, Veronica had said: ‘I can hardly remember a pre-apricot world, can you?’

But Veronica halted this retelling of past things. She put her hands up, as though trying to stop a moving train. She said she didn’t want to think about all that ‘normality’. She said she found any evocation of normality offensive. That was the word she used:
offensive.

Then, she’d put her face in her hands. Staring at her bent head, Kitty had seen that her hair – the thick head of hair she usually kept clean and shiny – needed washing and she thought that washing Veronica’s hair for her might be a consoling thing and so she gently suggested it. But Veronica didn’t move.

‘My hair’s fine,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

Kitty walked away.
Gardening without Rain,
she thought, hadn’t been a bad title for a book. But Kitty knew now that it was a book that would never be finished.

Kitty felt the hammock sway slightly. She looked out at the stand of oleanders, blemished by yellowing leaves, and saw them move and she thought, The new misery in my life is like the mistral: it dies down at night and lets me encounter silk-weavers in Mumbai and wind-surfers on the Indian Ocean, and then back it comes with the morning. And there’s nothing to be done. The wind sucks away the last drops of moisture from the poor, parched garden . . .

It was still early. Not yet seven. But she heard the telephone ring in the house and held the hammock still, listening and waiting. Lately, the ringing of the telephone had felt to Kitty like the rampaging of a wildcat, something broken free of a cage, intent on damage.

Kitty wondered, should she leave today? Packing wouldn’t take long. She could just go her studio and parcel up some of the watercolours rejected by the gallery in Béziers, be careful to choose the best of these, to try to sell them somewhere when she ran short of money in her new destination. Then fill a small suitcase with clothes and shoes. Put in two photographs: one of Veronica and one of the house. So simple. And by tonight she could be in London or Paris, deciding on her future travel plans, imagining Veronica left to separateness and solitude, to the altered ‘normality’ she’d apparently chosen . . .

Now she saw Veronica, wearing her white cotton dressing gown, crossing the lawn, coming towards her, carrying a mug of tea, shading her eyes against the strengthening light in the sky. Kitty pushed back the blanket and swung her legs out of the hammock and jumped down from it. A sparrow was startled out of one of the cherry trees and flew away. Kitty stood waiting.

Veronica handed Kitty the tea.

‘He
was
at the Swiss house,’ she said. ‘They’ve got matching prints. So we know he was still alive at around lunchtime on that Tuesday.’

‘Yes?’ said Kitty, looking down at her tea.

‘But that’s all. It doesn’t get us any further.’

Kitty began to sip her tea. ‘What about the Mas Lunel?’ she asked. ‘Did you have the police check the sandwich wrapper I found?’

‘No,’ said Veronica. ‘I don’t know what I did with that bit of cellophane. I may have thrown it away.’

Kitty looked at her beloved friend. She thought, I’m no use to her any more. She’s tired of the things I say. They stood in silence as the sun crept to the roofline of the house and gleamed on a blue-black starling pecking at the chimney stack, and then Kitty said: ‘What I think is best is . . . if I go away.’

Veronica’s arms were folded under her breasts. Now, she appeared to tighten her grip on herself, hugging the white robe to her, clutching her forearms with her big, workaday hands. She hung her head.

Kitty waited, but Veronica said nothing.

‘I’ve been wondering where,’ said Kitty. ‘I guess it doesn’t matter much. The world’s huge and I haven’t seen much of it. Only Norfolk and London. So it’s probably time I did . . .’

‘It can’t be other than it is,’ said Veronica, cutting Kitty off. ‘Of course it’s
not fair
on you, the way I am. But I can’t be any different. Each of us has the past we have.’

Kitty wanted to say, Yes, sure, we each have our own history. But we can
choose
to leave it behind – as I did. We can choose to go forwards and be free.

But Veronica went on talking, not looking at Kitty, but looking at the ground and the fallen cherry leaves. ‘In the school holidays sometimes,’ she said, ‘we went to stay with our cousins in Sussex and they had a huge garden and they knew lots of other children and they’d all get invited over, and we’d make up teams for games, like cricket and rounders. And you’d have to stand in line, waiting to be picked, and what you prayed was that you were going to hear your name early on and then you could feel all proud about belonging to your new team.

‘I was OK because everyone knew I was sporty and all that, but Anthony was never picked. He was
always
the last one. He was
always
left there on his own. I can still see it. His bandy little legs. This kid left there by himself because no one wanted him in their team. And I understood it somehow way back then, that I was the only person standing between Anthony and some colossal . . . tragedy. And I swore. I swore I’d never let go. And I never have. So that’s just what
is
and I’ve got nothing more to add.’

Veronica didn’t wait for Kitty to speak, sensing no doubt that Kitty was unmoved by the story she’d just told. She turned round and walked away.

Kitty held on to her tea mug. Watched Veronica until she disappeared inside the French windows of the salon. Then she began spinning a globe clockwise in her mind: Morocco . . . Egypt . . . Sri Lanka . . . Thailand . . . Australia . . .

She thought about the vibrant life in these places and how she would go there and become part of it and try to paint the things she saw. She wished, though, that she could just
arrive
somewhere – at some still lakeside jetty, at some clean, inexhaustible expanse of desert – without the lonely torment of the journey.

Aramon bought the newspaper every day now.

Some days, there were photographs of police searching the scrub. Some days, there was nothing about the Verey case – as though it had already been forgotten. Then, the headlines would come creeping back:
VEREY
: still no clues.
MISSING ENGLISHMAN
: police appeal for witnesses.

All the time, Aramon listened out for a siren, for the arrival of the police.

In the hot nights, sometimes, he believed he could hear the police car coming slowly up the pitted driveway and then stopping at a little distance from the house. He’d hurl himself out of bed and flatten his face to the window, and squint through the half-open shutters. He knew the shape of every shadow the moonlight cast on the terraces. His eye tried to identify each one, with his heart beating like an approaching train, while he held his breath, waiting for the dogs to begin barking. But the dogs stayed silent.

In his dreams, Serge beat him for his neglect of the dogs. His back and his arse were skinned alive.

He went out early one morning, before the heat came, and opened the gate of the pound and let the dogs out to forage among the holm oaks. Then he began raking up the stinking earth inside the pound. He tied a handkerchief round his face. He trawled all the mess towards him and shovelled it, load by load, into a wheelbarrow and tipped it out into the scrub, scattering it over the dry earth, for the flies and dung-beetles to find.

Then he went down to the lean-to behind the barn where bales of straw were piled up. He knifed open a new bale and began tearing at the straw to load it into the barrow. He felt exhausted. The handkerchief on his face was soaking wet and he tore it off and threw it down. The sun was climbing the hills on the other side of the valley. Get it done, Aramon told himself. Spread the straw, fill the water trough, whistle for the dogs, pen them in. Take a drink of pastis to calm your heart. Then sleep . . .

He piled up the straw and pushed the barrow back to the pound. He wheeled it in and tipped the straw out and took up his pitchfork, to begin spreading it around over the newly raked earth. Then he felt the sun’s heat strike him and he paused in his work. As he straightened up, his eye fell on something glinting in the soil in the far corner of the pound.

He stood the fork against the barrow and walked over to where the object lay. He bent down. He reached out and picked up a set of car keys.

The things that had to be done then . . . they made Aramon faint with terror.

He knelt in the pound, clutching the keys, smelling the clean straw, wishing he had the life of a dog, blameless and uncomplicated. From his afflicted lungs came an agonised keening sound, barely human.

He left everything the way it was, his task unfinished, the water trough unfilled, the gate of the pound open, the dogs loose among the oaks, sniffing for the scent of wild boar.

He looked in the direction of Audrun’s bungalow. He could see his own washing on her drying line, everything still in shadow down there, and motionless, with no wind to move it. He dreaded seeing Audrun standing there, watching him. And he thought, If I postpone the things I’ve got to do, she’ll arrive and find me and she’ll see whatever is in the car and then everything will be lost.

He made his way to the barn. His walk was limping and crabbed, as though he were trying to dodge his own shadow. He held the keys bunched in his hand, so tightly they dug into his palm.

He inched the old barn doors open and went in and it was cold in the barn and the sweat on him seemed to turn to ice. He stared at the car, draped in its sacking, piled up with crates and boxes. He felt unable to move.

Suppose it really was there, the body of Anthony Verey, rotting in the hired car?

Aramon wanted to cling to something. Almost wished he could die right there, just fall onto the floor of the barn and cease to be. Because this
thing
had come into his life and blighted it. It had no name. There was no name he could give it because he didn’t know what it was that he’d done.

To make himself move towards the car, he had to imagine that Serge was behind him, Serge with his belt, whipping him on.

He pressed the lock release button on the key fob. Lights flashed on the car.

He did it in one movement, reaching out and grabbing the handle and pulling the door, dislodging an empty apple crate, which crashed down beside him.

Immediately, it leapt at him, a foul stench in the car, and he cried out and slammed the door shut again.

He stood there, with his eyes closed, his breathing so fast and laboured that his chest burned with pain. To his dead father, he whispered, ‘Take it away. Take it away from me . . .’