The House with Blue Shutters (11 page)

Claudia did not blame Sébastien for not loving her, she was even honest enough to question whether there was not, in her own
love for him, some element of rankled pride, some urge to conquest, since he was the only man she had ever cared for who hadn’t
cared back. She couldn’t blame him because he had never made a secret of it, never disguised the fact that he slept with other
women, offered exactly what he had to give and never a promise of anything more. She had been convinced for a long time, for
the first three years of their odd relationship, that he must come to love her, if only by virtue of propinquity, but when
she had seen finally that this was not true, her bewilderment led to shaming jealousy, to the awful accusations in Paris.

The evidence for her long self-delusion was confusingly positive. Since their first meeting, at a dinner party organized by
Annabelle, who edited
Diréctions
, he had been erratically attentive. They had met about once a month, at first for weekends of bed at the flat in Paris, odd
nights when he was in London for work, then trips to Italy, to the countryside in France, a magical New Year in Bruges. She
had met his friends, had cautiously and over-casually (for one of the many irrationalities of their affair was its retaining
an air of the clandestine; Claudia had not at first thought it in good taste to discuss with Annabelle the fact that she was
fucking her star writer, and the feeling persisted long after Annabelle had been mollified), introduced him to hers. Sébastien
was not rich, but he sent her presents, wonderful, surprising presents, antique books, a cashmere overcoat, tiny pots of truffled
foie gras from Fauchon, a jam jar of water from the Grand Canal. He was lavish with compliments, he bought flowers and
cooked dinner and read to her, asked her opinion on a paper he was writing or a lecture he was giving, he remembered her birthday,
had dashed to London and held her through the night when her father died. They were intimate, made good stories of adolescent
miseries, talked about difficult colleagues, watched movies grubbily on Sunday afternoons. His concierge knew her name. It
was real, as far as she could see, no abbreviated romance perpetually stalled in its first stages, something rich, and in
her mind at least, teleological. She told herself that loving him meant she had no right to question, to demand. They talked
freely of her lovers and his, which Claudia felt was very sophisticated, yet somehow she had been certain that she, Claudia,
held him. But his pained, embarrassed confusion when she made her furious declaration, his letter, made it as clear as it
had been all along that he was just not available, to her or anyone else, for the kind of love she trusted that she deserved.
It had been so embarrassingly obvious, during that long night, that he pitied her, and she could not bring herself to hate
him even for that. Were it not for the child, she knew that she would have persuaded herself that this was good enough, as
she had so many times before, and to make what dignity she could from choosing so, but she knew, even as she lay by the pool
with a paperback collapsed across her nose and ached for him and dreamed of release, that he would not come, because she had
pride enough, at least, not to make him.

The Marquis d’Esceyrac had not written that morning to Aisling out of any sense of duty to their bitten and frightened guest,
but to please and distract his daughter-in-law, Delphine,
who was making her first visit to the house, from which she had been married, since Charles-Edouard’s death. The Comtesse
d’Esceyrac had her own interest in the Harveys (efficient Sarah Ashworth had rectified the doubt as to their name), equally
unflattering to Mr Froggett. Despite the evidence of the chateau, and the equally imposing
hôtel particulier
in St-Germain of which the Marquis now occupied just a single floor, the d’Esceyracs were in a somewhat straitened position.
The Marquis had been elected Vice President of the Jockey Club twenty years ago, a victory by default achieved when the two
other rival candidates discovered at the last moment that they were both shareholders in an extremely dubious mining enterprise
in Morocco; exposure of which by either of them for the purpose of social prestige meaning certain ruin for both. They had
a cheerful lunch at Le Grand Véfour and withdrew mutually from the race leaving d’Esceyrac as the only contender. The ambition
of his life thus attained, the Marquis spent most of his time and, to Delphine’s chagrin, his capital, in the Hôtel Drouot.
Charles-Edouard had practised indifferently as a stockbroker before the terrible shock of his illness, and Delphine, by her
own estimate at least, was now not only widowed but poor.

The chateau simply must be turned to account. The Anglo-Saxon love affair with La Belle France showed no signs of diminishing
passion, and judging by the number of horrid old farmhouses sold around the Marquis’s land to English people in the last few
years, the English were making a fine profit from pandering. Delphine had refused a number of kind invitations to the Côte
d’Azur this year in order to bring her
boys to spend some time with their grandfather, and their grandfather around to an idea. Why should not Esceyrac become a
sort of hotel? Like many women who have only ever seen work as a means of passing the time, Delphine was untroubled by her
complete ignorance of the hospitality business, or any business. She had it all worked out. The chapel would make a marvellous
restaurant, the two upper storeys bedrooms, the ballroom a lounge, the kitchens were already suitably vast, and the paddocks
and woods, stripped, could be a golf course. Perhaps it would even be possible to have a spa in the painted gallery, something
Eastern, a wooden jacuzzi bath fitted in an alcove. Delphine saw tennis courts, a new swimming pool, Americans arriving in
chauffeured black Mercedes, taking tea in the library.

As for the family, there was a perfectly wonderful old
grenier
, with a cottage next door, at the bottom of the hill on the opposite side to Murblanc, of which an architect might make a
large and beautiful house. Heaps of people had done it, in England too. Charles-Edouard’s colleague Armand had assured her,
when she discreetly mentioned her plans over a consolatory lunch at Laurent, that it would be simple for him to produce the
necessary investors. He had ordered two glasses of Château d’Yquem and a rather unnecessary
soufflé aux framboises
, and pressed her hand earnestly over the tablecloth.

‘If there’s anything I can do, Delphine, anything. For Charles-Edouard’s sake.’

She had worn her black Chanel suit, eaten the soufflé with the air of a woman starved, thrown up neatly before Sarah brought
the boys home from the Luxembourg, and dined on a fat-free yoghurt with bifidus. Armand LeSaux had a beautiful
villa at Saint-Cloud, and a 1930s racing yacht at Portofino. Possible, certainly possible.

Madame Lesprats, who ‘did’ at the chateau on Monday mornings, had been conveniently voluble on the subject of the Harvey woman.
Apparently she had spent a fortune on the old cow barn at Murblanc, and it was filled with boarders from May to September.
Delphine was sure the cleaning woman knew precisely how much they paid, though of course she had not asked, but Madame Lesprats
needed very little prompting to divulge details of Madame Harvey’s decorations, the expensive sheets that had come all the
way from Lille, and the unreasonable number of bathrooms the English seemed to require. According to her, the renovated barn
was a positive goldmine. Delphine was eager to meet her neighbour, since a few hard facts about the possible income from taking
guests might easily introduce the possibility of imitation to her father-in-law. Once he had agreed in principle, it would
not be difficult to convince him that the golf course and the Americans were entirely his own idea.

The Froggett daughter seemed very earnest and intelligent, thought Aisling, but it was a shame that the French could not be
relied upon to pick up nuance, the difference say, between Jonathan’s Turnbull and Asser shirt, foxed to white thread around
the collar and cuffs, and Giles Froggett’s glaring sky blue from Marks and Spencer. Wendy Froggett was not so bad, she spoke
a little French and was perfectly presentable. All the same, Aisling did not wish Harveys and Froggetts to meld together in
an amorphous English mass. Like many people who professed to love France, the Froggetts betrayed an innate
suspicion of it, a sense of divisiveness, as though France would be better off if it admitted that it was really just England
with better weather and fewer ugly buildings. Malcolm Glover, Aisling felt, was rather similar.

Aisling was in the kitchen again, preparing a chicken gremolata for the Glovers and the boys. If the drinks invitation at
the chateau turned out to be just that, there would be enough over for everyone, and if not it would freeze. She grated lemon
zest while the golden chicken pieces bubbled in her favourite shallow cast-iron pan and shredded parsley from the garden with
a mezzaluna. She couldn’t understand how people made such mess of food. Charlotte Glover’s dire cassoulet, for instance, or
the greasy navarin of lamb, really just a big Irish stew, which they had been served last time they dined at the Kendricks’.
Lucy Kendrick had made such a fuss about her blasted lump of meat, but the boiled potatoes had been as raw and weepy as new
cheese, and the carrots she claimed to have queued for in the market bobbed dingily in their viscous sauce. If people couldn’t
cook, they shouldn’t try, was Aisling’s opinion, there were so many wonderful things to buy, boned poussins rolled with pine
nuts and Armagnac-soaked prunes, fresh langoustines from the van that parked outside Castroux church on Tuesdays, charcuterie
and pâtés, glistening fruit tarts from the patisserie, bottled peaches and tiny Mirabelle plums in syrup. She would much rather
eat a dinner assembled from the shops of Castroux, simple and delicious, than the pathetic concoctions her neighbours insisted
on boasting about. She was sure that Charlotte Glover had put tomato ketchup in the cassoulet last time.

Aisling’s mother said that one could always taste the
resentment of an angry cook, and many of the Harveys’ friends seemed to bear out her description. Occasionally, they spoke
wistfully of Marks and Spencer, murmuring names like chicken tikka or steak and kidney pudding, like prisoners, or exiles
on a barren island recreating the lineaments of their lost city. To Aisling, this seemed feeble, yet there was a form of arrogance
in the covert refusal to adapt, a kind of colonial resistance, as though fresh goat cheese and brimming, iron-juiced tomatoes
were inconveniences to be endured before the next consignment of tins from the Army and Navy. Living in France might not presuppose
an interest in food, but it seemed to impose one, an insincere standard to which the English community required themselves
to pay homage. Each summer produced a newly fashionable bible, lavish with gluttonous adjectives, and the latest location
of paradise found, the Languedoc, Gascony, the Auvergne; Aisling saw them, crack-spined on sunloungers and listened to discussions
of their wonderful mysteries whilst eating food worthy of an English school canteen. The dissonance did not appear to strike
with the disciples, who were seemingly unaware of the glaring dissociation of sensibility between palate and brain. Aisling’s
disgust at this hypocritical lip-service was associated with the secret, spiteful remarks she wrote in her exercise book,
a deeply felt, hidden anger that people who did not understand food, did not understand France, should be allowed to be here
at all.

Since her arrival at Murblanc, Aisling’s enthusiasm for cooking had deepened to a point of such private sensuality that she
now barely spoke of it to anyone. Like most truly excellent cooks, Aisling was not greedy, she was inflamed by taste, not
satiety. She did not attempt to explain to herself the
source or nature of the satisfaction that came from her food, but felt it in a sense of stillness or peacefulness that was
with her more and more often, as she worked in the garden or pottered in the market, touching and smelling, as she stood silently
at the top of the orchard, watching the sunset behind the tower of Castroux church, holding a basket of velvety plums. Last
autumn, she had risen at five whenever it had rained and followed a tiny, ancient path along the base of the Esceyrac hill,
passing a little hidden shrine with a startlingly crude wooden statue of the Madonna, wilted flowers at her feet, to gather
ceps and chanterelles for frothy omelettes and deep, woody sauces. Aisling learned the pleasure of patience, of anticipating
the appearance of the first thick spears of creamy asparagus, the tiny, nutty potatoes whose seed she had sown herself in
drenching January rain, the brief rosy season of quinces. She felt she understood now the slow balance of the seasons, the
rainbow delight of summer fruit, the rich luxury of winter game. She was less and less inclined towards the elaborate dishes
she had prepared in London, felt no regret for chillies or lemon grass, no desire for papaya or Turkish sweets; the exotic
was mussels and oysters from Brittany, black truffles from the Périgord, wild garlic or the May acacias, so surprising in
batter. She was surprised at first when this sufficed, at her own willingness to repeat the same dish twenty times to perfect
the method, even something so simple as a chicken roasted with butter on a plate of the watercress that she could gather in
the broad trout pools of the Landine, where the little river flattened out by the abandoned watermill below Saintonge. One
afternoon, she had seen otters there, two old Chinese philosophers with thin, ponderous moustaches.