The House with Blue Shutters
Lisa Hilton read English at New College, Oxford and studied History of Art in Paris and Florence. She is the author of three
historical biographies,
The Real Queen of France
,
Mistress Peachum’s Pleasure
and
Queens Consort
. She currently lives between the south of France and London, where she works as a journalist and broadcaster.
The House with Blue Shutters
is her first novel.
This paperback edition first published in Great Britain in 2010 by Corvus, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.
Copyright © Lisa Hilton 2010.
The moral right of Lisa Hilton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously.
First eBook Edition: January 2010
ISBN: 978-0-857-89050-4
Corvus
An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd
Ormond House
London WC1N 3JZ
Contents
For Nicola
‘y a souffert las pénos del diable: attendré et beyré ré béni.
Ayma et n’est ré pas ayma. Habé talen et n’abé rés à minstsa.’
‘To wait and see nothing come, to love and not to be loved, to
hunger without food. These are the sufferings of the devil.’
Occitan proverb
SUMMER HOLIDAYS
‘What shall I give them for pudding?’ asked Aisling.
‘Pudding?’ said Jonathan.
‘I must say, it’s absolutely typical of your brother to arrive on Thursday, with the bloody PG barbecue, so I thought either
the chocolate parfait with chilled pistachio custard, or just the strawberry crème brûlée, which always comes out, but then
I think we gave him that at Easter, didn’t we, not that he’d remember so I don’t suppose it matters really, but I was thinking
with the PGs, we’ll be late, so I thought just melon and the good
jambon
and then a chicken tarragon, so the pistachio would look a bit more like trying. Do you think this Claudia’s a vegetarian?
I could do a
gratin de courgettes
in case, but in this heat?’
‘Why don’t you do the strawberry thingy? I’ll get a bottle of Monbazillac down.’
‘Good idea, darling,’ said Aisling.
The Harveys smiled at one another. They had been five
years at Murblanc, and variations on this conversation had passed between them several times a week. Aisling had a blue leather
book from Smythson’s of Bond Street, in which she wrote down the details of who had come and what she cooked, so as to be
sure of not serving the same combinations of dishes and guests. The book had been a Christmas present from Jonathan and was
always casually on display on the kitchen dresser. In a series of orange plastic-backed exercise books with ruled squares
Aisling kept a similar record of the food she made, in July and August, for the paying guests. She lived in fear of a wandering
boarder discovering one of these volumes on a prowl about her huge stone-flagged kitchen, since she had got into the habit
of adding comments on the visitors in the margins. She flicked through now, to remind herself of what the Lawses had eaten
nearly two weeks ago for their welcome dinner. The entry for last Friday week said ‘Welcome dinner. Laws Family. Chilled sorrel
soup with parmesan toasts. Slice foie gras with apple chutney. Guinea fowl. Cheese, salad.
Tarte aux framboises
. Mrs L fat. Perm. Children horrid.’ Somehow, Aisling was unable to break this secret practice of judgement, which was inconvenient,
really, as it necessitated her hiding the current book behind the cream china flour bin or in the larder with the cat food,
and usually being unable to find it, causing her to wake sometimes in the early hours of the morning, beset by chimerae of
repeated recipes.
The paying guests were a disappointment to Aisling. She had worked hard on La Maison Bleue, a square stone barn with powdery
turquoise shutters at the dormer windows, which the Harveys had transformed during their first winter
into a four-bedroomed cottage with a terrace and a small walled garden. Murblanc lay at the bottom of the hill opposite the
village of Castroux, beneath Aucordier’s farm. The guesthouse, in turn, was below the main building, beyond the swimming pool.
The Harveys and their own guests dined on the terrace above the house itself, overlooking the valley, while the PG perspective
was brought up short by the square line of the chateau wood, yet the presence of the visitors, in the form of obese, shrieking
toddlers or the television turned up loud to Sky Sports, was a permanently irritating reminder of what Aisling believed herself
to have left behind, a mosquito-itch of small but significant failures. She had spent more than she ought on furnishing La
Maison Bleue, determined that it should not display the usual tasteless collection of half-broken surplus furniture with which
many English filled their shabby gîtes. Each room was painted a different soft-faded pastel, inspired, as Aisling informed
potential renters in her brochure, by the famous frescoes in the church at Landi, the two bathrooms were large and modern,
there was a dishwasher and a microwave and, against Aisling’s aesthetic judgement, the ‘digi-box’, so beloved of ex-pats,
which everyone pretended they installed merely to keep up with the cricket, but which gave access to all English television
channels.
Aisling had been delighted when the inspector from
Charme Français
had pronounced La Maison Bleue fit for inclusion in the guide, particularly as the woman, a weary-seeming divorcee who lived
in one of the grander parts of Provence, had arrived during a particularly raw weekend in March, when the countryside was
stripped and ragged, and Aisling’s
crema catalana
had, according to the blue leather book, come out stodgy and
too full of aniseed. Oliver had commented most unhelpfully that it tasted like cough mixture, and both the boys had refused
to show off their French. Mrs Highland was indifferent to Aisling’s food, claiming that she preferred a salad and a huge lump
of cheese, and had grimly shone a torch under the beds and inspected the lavatory cisterns. She and Jonathan had had a long
and apparently satisfactory discussion about drains, oblivious to Aisling’s increasingly frantic attempts to divert her onto
the delights of Castroux market or the view from the pool terrace. Nevertheless, Aisling felt that the credit for the entry,
‘Stunning location, highly comfortable, large swimming pool. Sleeps ten’, was hers, rather than the plumbing’s, though it
was a pity Mrs Highland hadn’t had room to say anything about the frescoes.
Mrs Highland’s lack of interest in Aisling’s attempts at elegance was reflected in a similar obliviousness on the part of
the readers of
Charme Français
. They came, numerously, to loll by the pool drinking beer and to stuff the fridge with cases of nasty white wine bought en
route at Calais, they microwaved pizzas for their children, and watched the television, and altogether, they claimed, had
a wonderfully relaxing holiday, but they did not visit the monastic museum at Landi, or the grottoes at Saux, or take any
of the walks Aisling had so painstakingly marked in pink highlighter pen on a large-scale map. Occasionally, Aisling would
meet one of the wives at the Saturday morning market in the village, surly sunburned husband trailing behind with an absurd
rustic basket, and Aisling would smile gaily to conceal her cringing at their bulging shorts, and suggest that they try the
goat’s cheese that dear little Monsieur le Filastre made himself and brought
wrapped in fig leaves and brown string, or the walnut bread for which Castroux was known. Inevitably, the straw basket was
filled with scented soaps attached to wooden paddles, impractically small bottles of flavoured olive oil, and tins of cassoulet.
Aisling imagined them, these gastronomic souvenirs, lingering dusty and reproachful in the back of English kitchen cupboards
until the obese toddlers grew up and threw them out when they shunted their parents to a nursing home.
Aisling herself did not wear shorts, or wilting patterned skirts, or foolish straw hats. Her hair was neatly and expensively
shaped into a collar-bone-length bob once a month in Toulouse. In the mornings, particularly if she was busy with the garden
or the ducks, she happily drove into Landi in jeans and a grubby sweater, with a fleece thrown over, when she was not working
she wore linen tunics in white or navy, with fitted trousers, leather flats, and lipstick. Shorts, she felt, were one of the
many elements in which the PGs were not quite up to the mark. She was perfectly aware of this snobbery, professing on occasion
to hate herself for it, although she did not, admitting in franker moments that she was merely being honest, but it coloured
her relationship with her visitors, rendering it at once bumptiously didactic and guiltily genial. Jonathan was better, repeating
the same remarks about motorways and routes with the husbands at the welcome drink, cheerfully shifting suitcases and changing
lightbulbs, even occasionally watching a match with a bottle of beer (the Harveys did not have Sky Sports), and otherwise
apparently unaware of the boarders’ existence. Aisling asked too many energetically pleasant questions of the wives, insisted
that Richard and Oliver play in the pool with the children, and
caught herself agreeing with enthusiastic insincerity as to the lost and unmourned advantages of Sainsbury’s and Tesco.
She had imagined, she thought, resentfully rubbing in a
pâte brisée
for the individual blueberry and ricotta tarts she would store in the big freezer in the barn until Thursday, that La Maison
Bleue would attract different sorts of people. People who were artistic, who would spend long evenings chatting over wine
about opera or the latest prize-winning novel, who would admire Aisling’s cooking instead of poking at it suspiciously, who
would speak French with her boys. There had been a winter rental, a gloomy young couple with a goatee and stringy dreadlocks
who claimed, respectively, to be a painter, the goatee, and a writer, the dreadlocks, but they had stayed three weeks and
barely emerged from the house except to drag car-loads of shopping from the Landi hypermarket indoors. The fumes of what Aisling
was sure was hashish lingered about the doorway. Madame Lesprats had shown the sheets to Aisling, with great disgust, when
they departed. The couple had apparently made love during the woman’s period, and Aisling’s carefully chosen old linens, bought
especially at the annual
brocante
in Lille, were a mottled, liverish abstract of stains. Madame Lesprats had refused to have anything to do with what she referred
to as
leur saloperies
, and Aisling had boiled the sheets herself and eventually cut them up, sadly, for dusters.
Oliver and Richard trailed into the kitchen, slapping wet footmarks on the limestone. ‘Mrs Laws,’ said Oliver, then hunched
into a fit of unattractive sniggers. ‘Mrs Laws,’ took up Richard, then collapsed exaggeratedly onto his brother’s back. ‘Mrs
Laws,’ they howled, ‘has grey pubes! We saw them,
Mum! Sticking out of her bikini! It’s sick!’