The House with Blue Shutters (18 page)

It seemed to Claudia that Oriane’s idea of life was a sort of upstairs downstairs gleaned from the television, nothing to
do with her actual memories. Perhaps she had forgotten, or didn’t care.

‘You didn’t live up there?’

‘No, I had to come home to take care of my brother.’

‘Your brother?’

‘He was killed in the war.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Why should you be? But it’s nice of you to come anyway. Would you like something to drink?’

They had sickly
sirop de grenadine
diluted with tap water, the kind that Claudia had clamoured for as a child on the beach in Brittany. She felt tears starting
and twisted up her face to contain them.

‘It’s no good, you know,’ said the old woman softly.

‘What isn’t?’ Claudia asked, trying for brightness.

‘It’s not his, is it?’

There was something so certain in the question that it seemed pointless to feign surprise or anger.

‘No,’ she replied, ‘it’s not.’ Claudia could hear the wind outside, louder than it ever sounded down the valley, tugging about
the yard. She put her arms on the table and rested her head upon them for a moment, swallowing the beginning of a sob. Then
she lifted her face and said in a calm voice, ‘I don’t want to get married. It’s not Alex’s fault. I just don’t.’

‘No.’ Placidly. ‘I don’t suppose that you do. It’s not something we choose, is it?’

‘What?’

‘Who we love.’

Oddly, Claudia considered afterwards, she did not feel stupid, nor damaged by her confession. She did not ask how it was that
Oriane seemed to know so surely what she had so carefully kept hidden, nor expect her to say something wise. They were silent
for a while, then Oriane pointed to the black
and white photograph Claudia had noticed when she had come in the night with Aisling. ‘That was my son. Jacky.’

‘Your son? Did he—’

‘He went away. When he found out who his father was, he went away.’

Claudia stared at the old woman opposite her. Had she understood properly?

‘When he found out who his father was? He went away then?’

‘Yes, he was ashamed, you see.’

‘Ashamed?’

‘I met his father there. At the chateau. We had to keep it a secret, of course. And then when I knew I was expecting, I quarrelled
with him.’

‘Of course.’ Claudia felt certain that she knew who the father must have been, it was so predictable and yet one didn’t really
believe in these things, they were sad stories from history books. Cautiously, she reached out to touch Oriane’s hand. She
had not expected a response, but the touch seemed to quicken something in her and she grasped Claudia’s hand strongly, holding
it tight until Claudia began to feel embarrassed, there was something so starved in it. She pulled away gently.

‘I’m very sorry. You must have been very unhappy.’

Oriane did not reply. They both looked at the television, and after a time the old lady seemed to doze off.

Later, when Claudia said goodbye, Oriane kissed her, right left right, the way they did here. ‘Perhaps you’ll come again,’
she said, though it wasn’t a question. The old eyes had seemed bright and beady, but close in Claudia saw that their shine
was
filmy, bleached out. Her face was cool against Claudia’s cheek, above the neckline of her blouse was a growth of some sort,
or a cyst, purple and bulbous. A witch’s teat. Claudia thought it was disgusting, and wondered why it hadn’t been removed.

‘Oh yes,’ said Aisling, ‘it’s terrible the way people suffered around here.’

They were in the drawing room upstairs where Aisling had decided not to light a fire all the same. It had been clear when
Claudia returned that the men were gone, there were no belongings lying about the terrace and Aisling had lit a candle that
smelt of honey.

‘But the son didn’t die in the war,’ Claudia objected.

‘Madame Lesprats told me that his father did, as well as Oriane’s brother. Can you imagine? Though it’s not unusual around
here, if you look on the monument in the church for example, the same few names over and over. Terrible.’ Aisling was warming
up now.

‘And Madame Lesprats said that there was some sort of a scandal with poor Ginette. Apparently she was engaged to this Jacky
character and then he went off and left her,’ she added excitedly.

‘So she lives there because Oriane felt guilty or something?’

‘Maybe. But they weren’t married, she and the father that is, because she’s Mademoiselle Aucordier and the farm was in her
family. But it was the war, I suppose, GI brides and all that.’

‘It’s so sad.’

‘Mmm.’

Claudia had no intention of telling what she had discovered, even for the satisfaction of the gossip. She imagined that
Madame Lesprats probably knew that the Marquis had fathered a child on one of his servants, but Oriane’s prescience had been
so disarming, her confidences so touching, that Claudia felt both protective and superstitious about betraying her. She did
allow a little smile at what Alice Froggett would have made of the story.

‘What?’

‘Oh, nothing. It’s funny in the country isn’t it? People seem so much more interesting.’ If that was a bit near the bone,
Aisling didn’t notice. Claudia refilled Aisling’s glass of red and took another from the
buffet
for herself.

‘Have you been to the River Café,’ Aisling asked, ‘in London?’

‘Yes, a couple of times. Why?’

‘Well, I’ve got this book of theirs, those two women, thingy Rogers, and there’s a recipe for sourdough I thought I might
try, but it’s very longwinded.’

They made conversation about recipes and menus until they heard Alex’s car in the lane.

Next day was hotter than ever, as though the sun had had a holiday. The Sternbachs drove away again after breakfast, and Aisling
was inclined to fret about this, thinking that perhaps it meant they didn’t like La Maison Bleue, until she reminded herself
that this was precisely the kind of guest she had wanted,
doing
sort of people. Perhaps they had gone to Cahors, or even to Albi, to one of the huge August markets. PG-less, everyone was
down at the pool when Ginette drooped up on her bicycle.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Jonathan loudly, ‘doesn’t that woman have a home of her own?’

‘There does seem an awful lot of coming and going,’ added Alex.

‘We only notice because bugger-all happens in between.’

‘Don’t be unkind,’ hissed Aisling, sitting up and putting on her sarong. ‘How are you, Ginette?’ she called loudly in French.
‘Did you enjoy yourself at the lotto?’ Even to herself that sounded a bit duchess-like.

‘Madame Glover was there from Saintonge. She won the fridge freezer.’

‘Really? Well, that’s nice. Did you win anything?’

‘No, nor did Madame Lesprats.’

‘Oh dear.’

Ginette hovered. Aisling felt that she had been caught out being lazy, lolling in her bathing costume, though it was Saturday
afternoon. That was a problem here, that there were just no barriers. Should she offer Ginette something?

‘I just came to say thank you to Claudia for sitting with Mademoiselle Oriane last night.’

‘Well, that’s nice.’

‘No problem, Ginette,’ called Claudia gaily from her sun lounger, ‘any time you feel like partying!’ She was already determined
to go back to Aucordier’s as soon as she could.

‘I’ll get on then.’

‘OK. See you soon.’

Ginette turned her bicycle around and wheeled it down the track.

‘Honestly!’ said Aisling, but the others had turned back to the sun. No one seemed inclined to discuss Charlotte Glover and
the fridge freezer.

Laurent Nadl had lost his right leg at Verdun the year that Oriane Aucordier was born, and when the rest of him was sent home
to Castroux he felt, bitterly, that he was not accorded a hero’s welcome. Stumps of various sorts had never been uncommon
in the village. Old Vionne the butcher had only two fingers (the right ones at least, as he was fond of crudely reminding
the women) on his left hand, Camille Lesprats had only a lump of right arm, the rest of it shredded by a threshing machine.
He hadn’t even been drunk at the time, though he’d been making up for it ever since, challenging the remaining elderly boozers
in the café to call him a coward and sobbing into his wine about the lost limb that would surely have made him the terror
of the Boch, had he only been allowed to fight. To Laurent, it seemed that people felt that coming home at all was more than
he had a right to expect. He was not about to apologize for surviving. It did not occur to him that Castroux’s reticence was
moved in some
quarters by a delicacy towards families who had lost sons, brothers, young fathers, and in others by a grief so huge and dulling
that those possessed of it endured at first only by indifference. One life more or less could have very little meaning. Four
men, finally, had come back to Castroux, from the nineteen who had gone. Laurent had left his leg behind, and Jean-Marc Teulière
his wits. Yves Contier was sound, so, it seemed, was Bernard Vionne. Jean-Claude Larivière, the fifth survivor, never returned
from his demob leave in Paris.

He’d been a real chum, JC. For a while they had been in it together, all of them, until JC was made corporal and moved along
the lines. He had always been a bright spark, reading things from the newspaper, spending money on books that he sent away
for. Laurent didn’t care much for talking politics, but JC had been a great one for it, always on about the working man. As
far as Laurent could see, the working man did the graft and took the bullets when the time came, but JC said it didn’t have
to be like that, that big changes were coming for sure, and Laurent tried to seem like he understood, he’d even got into a
fight or two, sticking up for him. JC wasn’t a big man, like Laurent, but he was a scrapper. Laurent could see why he wouldn’t
have wanted to come back to Castroux, though his mother had taken on something dreadful; JC was a livewire, someone who wanted
to be where the action was. Even Flanders hadn’t knocked that out of him.

When Laurent took the habit of walking up the hill from Murblanc to Aucordier’s after supper in the long summer evenings of
1941, he still did not quite comprehend that he had only one leg. Accustomed to its absence, he nevertheless had not entirely
discarded the belief, sustained unquestioningly
on the train ride south more than twenty years ago, that it would somehow grow back. This arbitrary state of the leg’s being
permitted Laurent a quick recovery from the practicalities of his disability and the repugnance it aroused in him. Since matters
were only temporary, it was easier to make the best of them. The stump was smoothed over with skin, though it still had a
tendency to develop a greasy fungus, which itched deliciously and left pale lines of weak, vealy blood when Laurent raked
his nails through it beneath the bedclothes. The wooden leg was so heavy, the leather strap chafing painfully on the now hairless
skin of his thigh, that Laurent only wore it for church, preferring the relative mobility of his crutch. With his stump tied
into a woollen stocking and covered by the trouser leg, which his mother had sewn into a bag, he could move quite quickly,
hopping around the pivot of the crutch when he needed to turn, and balancing so well, when stationary, that he could use his
right arm almost freely. He did exercises every morning, drills he had learned in the Army, press-ups and curls of an iron
bar filed off from the frame of a rusting plough. Muscle had slabbed on to his arms and chest, he worked his left side more
to balance out the effort of the crutch to the right. Laurent was tall for Castroux, and in his Sunday suit, with a stuffed
boot laced over the false leg and his massive shoulders squared above his still-narrow waist he looked, if not handsome, at
least strong and healthy. There had been no question of him spending his life as an invalid, even had he wished to. His mother
was a widow, he was the only son and there was work to be done.

Laurent could not have explained, even had anyone ever asked, why it was that he felt his life so spoiled. He rarely
thought of the war. At first, Bernard Vionne seemed urgent with the need to speak of it, always coming up to Laurent in the
café or asking him for a glass of wine at market, wanting to tell his stories, even to hear Laurent’s. After a time Laurent
avoided him and the group he formed with Yves and Jean-Marc, who Bernard insisted on pushing through the village in his chair.
Now and again Jean-Marc would call out violently from the trench where he had left his mind, and Bernard would hold his arm
tightly, staring into his face and saying ‘Now then’ until he was quiet. They became a familiar sight, the three of them,
sitting in the square on fine evenings, and after a while no one took much notice of them, except to leave the wooden bench
at the café door free, by unspoken consent.

Laurent had no wish to join their reminiscences. He got on with his work, the work he had always intended to do, the work
he had dreamed of returning to for two years at the front. His injury was no stay on what ambition he had had, which had only
ever been an assumption that he would remain at Murblanc, yet he felt now a sense of constraint there, a movement in himself
towards unnamed and unknown chances of a different sort of life, and he grew convinced, as he would never perhaps have done
had he returned to Castroux as whole as he appeared on Sundays, that something to which he was entitled had been taken from
him.

Murblanc had been bought from the d’Esceyracs, Laurent knew, though he did not know and would not have much cared that the
house was older, in parts, than the chateau, and that the d’Esceyracs had farmed there before they became grand and moved
up the hill when Henri IV was king.
Murblanc land began in the little wood below the rise of the castle hill, the Bois de la Reine, which the d’Esceyracs liked
to claim, a nonsense again unknown to Laurent, had been named for Queen Marie-Thérèse as she made her wedding journey up from
the Basque country to Versailles. Laurent knew the wood was named for the Queen of Heaven, as there was a little shrine to
Our Lady by the stream that circled the base of the chateau hill and formed the western boundary of Murblanc, passing the
cow barn on its low mound in the winter meadow, and tipping into the Landine. Between the wood and the meadow was Bottom Field,
with High Field on the ridge that ran against the house in the middle of the property, and Top Field joining the old road
that linked the Castroux bridge and the plain. From the road, the Murblanc lane cut deep against the two fields to the yard,
leaving a little triangle of scrub for the donkeys by the orchard wall. Behind the orchard were the small barn, the old bread
oven now used for storing wood, and the vegetable plot, and at the back, before the land rose to rocks and a thin cover of
ever-puny trees, Laurent’s father had planted six rows of terraced vines. Though the yield was small, the concentrated sun
on the bank and the moisture that filtered down from the plain produced a rich red wine that was as good as any from the big
vineyards around Cahors.