Trespass (4 page)

In 1945, he said, when she was a few days old – ‘a stinky baby’ – she’d been wound round with rags and dumped on the steps of the Carmelite Convent at Ruasse by her mother, who had been a
collaboratrice.
But the nuns didn’t want her. She was a child of sin. The nuns had gone from village to village, asking, did anybody want a baby, a girl? Would anybody agree to care for an ugly baby with a belly-button like a pig’s tail? But nobody wanted her. Nobody in their right minds wanted the baby of a
collaboratrice
with a belly-button like a pig’s tail – except Bernadette.

Bernadette was an angel, boasted Aramon, his angel of a mother. And she had persuaded Serge to let her adopt the baby. Adopt. That was the word Aramon used when he told this story. He said it meant taking pity on something that wasn’t yours. He said that Serge had screamed and shouted that no, he already had a child – his son, Aramon – and that was all that mattered to him, and what in the world did he want with a mewling girl?

But day and night Bernadette had pleaded with him – God knows why – to let her take in the baby dumped on the doorstep of the Carmelite nuns. And, in the end, she’d won. God knows how. And so they all trooped down to Ruasse and went into the freezing cold convent and heard the baby’s cries echoing round the freezing cold walls, and brought her home and she was given the name of the Abbesse of the Convent of the Carmelites: Audrun.

‘And that was you,’ Aramon concluded. ‘Adopted. See? And now my father’s going to swipe your arse for eating our bread. Because he never takes pity on things that aren’t his.’

For a long time, Audrun had believed this story which the brother, Aramon, kept alive.

‘I expect you’ve been wondering who your father is, Audrun. Uhn?’

Yes, she had. She knew babies had to have two parents, not one. Everybody in La Callune had two parents, except those who had ‘lost’ their brave fathers in the war. So she asked Aramon: ‘Was my father one of those “lost” men?’

‘Well,’ he said, laughing, ‘lost to evil! Lost in Hell now! He was a German. An SS man. And your mother was a
putain de collabo
. That’s why you’ve got a belly-button like a pig’s tail.’

She didn’t understand what any of this meant, only that she was supposed to feel ashamed. Aramon told her that the people of Ruasse had shaved off her mother’s hair (not the hair of her mother, Bernadette, but the hair of this other mother she’d never known, the
collaboratrice
), shaved off her long blonde hair and marched her naked through the market, and the market traders had thrown handfuls of fish guts at her breasts because this was what you had to do to women who ‘went’ with German soldiers, this was their punishment, this and the birth of deformed children with pigs’ tails growing out of their stomachs.

Little Audrun sat in the dust inside the wire pen where the bantams foraged. She tried to clutch the smallest of the hens in her skinny arms. She could feel the terrified beating of its heart, see its gnarled feet, like baby corn cobs, clawing the air. Not even the bantam wanted to be close to her. She was the daughter of a
putain de collabo
and a German soldier of the SS. In nearby Pont Perdu, twenty-nine people had been killed by German infantry in a ‘reprisal operation’ and their names had been engraved on a stone monument, on a wayside shrine above the river, and flowers were laid there, flowers which were not real and never died.

Audrun drew her old and frayed cardigan round her body and walked on through the wood, her face lifted to the warmth of the sun. In another month, there would be swallows. In the hour before dusk, they’d circle, not over her bungalow with its low, corrugated iron roof, but above the Mas Lunel, where Aramon still lived. They’d be looking for nesting sites under the tiles, against the cracked stone walls, and she would stand at the window of her flimsy home, or in her little
potager,
hoeing beans, watching them, watching the sun go down on another day.

She would see the strip-light blink on in the kitchen of the mas – that old green-tinged rod of light – and picture her brother stumbling to and from the electric stove, trying to fry
lardons,
gulping from his glass of red wine, dropping ash from his cigarette into the fat of the frying pan, picking up the bottle and drinking from that, his stubbled face wearing that fatuous grin it acquired when the wine excited his senses. Then, with a shaking hand, he’d try to eat the burnt
lardons
and a burnt fried egg, spooning everything in, with another cigarette smouldering on a saucer and outside in the dark the dogs in their wire pound howling because he’d forgotten to feed them . . .

Upstairs, he lived in grime. Wore his clothes till they stank, then hung them at the window to wash themselves in the rain, air themselves in the sun. And he was proud of this. Proud of his ‘ingenuity’. Proud of the strangest things. Proud that the father, Serge, had named him after a variety of grape.

What a brother to have!

She went to her other mother, Bernadette. She took a pair of scissors and asked Bernadette to cut off the pig’s tail. And the mother held her close and kissed her head and said, yes, it would be seen to. They’d go to the hospital in Ruasse and the doctors would make everything ‘sensible and tidy’. But doctors were expensive and life was hard, here in La Callune, and she would have to be patient.

So Audrun patiently asked, ‘Who was my other mother, the
collabo?
Did she die? Was she hung upside down in a well by her ankles tied with wire?’

Bernadette began weeping and laughing, both at once, and sat Audrun on her knee and cradled her head against her shoulder. Then she tugged her arms free of her pinafore and undid her blouse and showed Audrun her white breast with its brownish nipple. ‘I’m your mother,’ she said. ‘I nursed you here, at my breast. What’s this nonsense about
collabos?
There were none of those in La Callune, and you mustn’t use that word. I’m your mother and this is where I suckled you. Feel.’

Audrun put her small hand on the bosom, soft and warm to her touch. She wanted to believe this mother’s words, comforting to her as bread, but Aramon had warned her: ‘Bernadette will lie to you. All women lie. They’re descended from witches. Even nuns have witches for mothers. Nuns lie about themselves, about their chastity . . .’

So she took her hand away and climbed down from Bernadette’s knee and began to run away from her.

But this upset Bernadette and she came after her and lifted her up and said: ‘You’re mine, Audrun. My little girl, my darling. I swear it on my life. You were born in the early morning and I held you in my arms and the sun shone through the bedroom window and in my eyes.’

Audrun stood now in front of a sweet chestnut tree, moved, as she was each spring, by the sight of the new leaf. In her childhood, the family had fed their pigs with chestnuts and the pig flesh had skin that bubbled up into beautiful dark crackling, and it tasted sweet and had no taint about it.

But now a blight had come.
Endothia
, it was called. The chestnut bark split and reddened and fell and the branches above the reddened scars began to die. All over the Cévennes, the chestnut forests were dying. Even here, in Audrun’s wood, the signs of
endothia
were visible. And people told her there was nothing to be done, there was no magician or saviour, as there had been long ago, when Louis Pasteur had travelled down to Alès and discovered a cure for the terrible silkworm diseases.
Endothia
was part of life now, the part that had changed beyond recall, the part that was old and blighted and withered by time. Trees would soon die in this wood. There was nothing to be done except to cut them down and burn the logs on the fire.

Audrun’s bungalow had no fire. It had four ‘night-storage’ heaters, heavy as standing stones. As the winter afternoons drew on, the heaters cooled, the air cooled, and Audrun had nothing to do but sit in her chair with a crocheted blanket over her knees. She folded her hands in her lap. And sometimes, in this deep cold stillness, she would feel an
episode
approaching, like a shadow that laid itself across her, a shadow attached to no solid form, but which took the colour from everything in the room, which bleached her mind and made the furniture stretch and shift behind a plane of glass . . .

Audrun examined the trunk of the chestnut tree. No sign of disease on this one yet, but she said the dread word to herself:
Endothia.
The air was so still that she seemed to hear her own soundless voice. Then, the next moment, she became aware that she wasn’t alone and she turned and saw him, stumbling as he did these days – he who, as a boy, had been as agile and swift as an Indian brave – gleaning wood for the fire, putting the fallen pieces into some kind of sling on his back, a sling he’d cobbled together out of an old moth-eaten blanket.

‘Aramon.’

He raised his arm, as though to prevent her from coming near him. ‘Just a bit of wood,’ he said. ‘Just a bit of wood for the fire.’

He had trees of his own, a dense thicket of holm oaks behind the dog pound. But he was too lazy to take the saw to them, or else knew that he shouldn’t trust himself with the saw; the saw would have his hand.

‘Just a branch or two, Audrun.’

His hair was dirty and wild. His unshaven face was pallid, almost grey in the sharp sunshine. ‘And I was coming to ask—’

‘Ask what?’ she said.

‘I’ve got in a muddle there, up at the mas. I can’t find anything. My
carte d’identité,
my glasses . . .’

She hardly ever went inside his house – the house that had once been kept so clean and orderly by her beloved Bernadette. The stink of it made her gag. Even the sight of his old shirts hanging out of the window to be washed by the rain, she had to turn away when she saw these, remembering Bernadette’s laundry chest and all the sheets and shirts and vests white as fondant and folded edge-to-edge and smelling like fresh toast.

‘Aramon,’ she said. ‘Go home. Take the kindling. You can keep what you’ve gleaned, even though you know it’s not yours.’

He let go his makeshift sling and the pieces of wood crashed around his feet and he stared helplessly at them. ‘You’ve got to help me,’ he said. ‘It’s
complicated
up there. You know?’

‘What d’you mean, “complicated”?’

‘Everything’s got jumbled up with everything else. I can’t tell one thing from another. Someone has to sort it out. Please . . .’

Her stare was as hard as yew. She felt the poison of him, like a yew berry in her mouth.

‘You can have a couple of bantams,’ he offered. ‘I’ll wring their necks for you, pluck them, gut them. You can invite Marianne Viala, uhn? Have a lovely feast. Get the gossip.
Pardi!
I know how you women love to gossip.’

‘Have a couple of bantams for doing what?’

He shifted his feet, scratched his neck. His eyes, once beautiful, were still brown and deep. ‘Just
help me.
Please, Audrun. Because I’m scared now. I’ll admit it.’

‘Scared of what?’

‘I don’t know. It’s this mess I’m living in. I don’t know where to find the things I need.’

Boys.

They were young men in their twenties, but Anthony Verey had often referred to them like that: ‘the boys’ or ‘my boys’. It had given him power over them to disparage what had, until recently, threatened to overwhelm him and make him weak: their beauty.

The boys he chose were mostly poor, on state benefit or with menial jobs, trying to get into their adult lives, trying to survive in London. He brought them to his exquisitely decorated flat above the shop on the Pimlico Road. Loved the thrill of it – a poor stranger in his bed. Then he took them downstairs and let them see the
beloveds
in the near-darkness. Let them feel, touch, smell the
beloveds.
Smell knowledge, security, comfort, entitlement, money. But he never let them linger. Paid them fairly, but always sent them away without any promises of further meetings, because he couldn’t stand the idea of their presumption that he, because he was older, because he was almost
old,
would enslave himself to their virility and youth.

But for a long time, now, there had been no ‘boys’ in Anthony’s bed. Desire for them had gone absent-without-leave. The only boy who visited Anthony – in dreams and in those empty times when he sat at the back of the shop and no customers came in – was the boy he himself had once been.

He knew that this was abject, a sentimental surrender, but he couldn’t help it; this was who he yearned to be: himself as a boy, sitting with his mother, Lal, staring at the rainbow colours the sunshine magicked into the bonbonnière on the dining-room table of her house in Hampshire, while the two of them entranced themselves polishing silver, and outside in the garden one of the long untroubled summers of the 1950s went slowly by.