The House with Blue Shutters (20 page)

Monsieur Chauvignat was standing to make the toast. Aisling translated in a loud whisper. ‘Friends, it is a great pleasure
to see so many of you here again on August the twenty-second. This is a day for celebration and a day for remembrance. We
celebrate the great courage of those who lived through the occupation of Castroux, and we remember those who gave
their lives for the freedom of France. My own father, as you know, was in Germany. Sadly he is no longer with us, but we applaud
his companions. Amélie Lesprats—’ The white haired bundle at their table struggled to its feet as the clapping broke out.

‘See,’ Aisling heard Alex say to Claudia, ‘no way it was a bloke.’

‘—Yves and Magalie Contier, Jean Charrot, and my own mother Cécile Chauvignat.’

‘Do you see Yves?’ said Charlotte Glover, pointing to the tiny, toothless old man in a wheelchair and beret. ‘It’s wonderful,
he’s a hundred and one and still bright as a button.’

‘
Vieux schnoc
,’ muttered Kevin to Richard. ‘
Il raconte les mêmes conneries chaque année.
’

Everyone sang the ‘Marseillaise’. Claudia could see Aisling mouthing along, though it was evident she didn’t know the words.
The level of conversation rose, as with their duty done people settled to the serious business of eating. Plates of excellent
foie gras were brought around, then a ‘seafood surprise’ whose contents, swimming in a floury
sauce Nantaise
, had obviously not seen the sea for some time. A large platter of charcuterie, with tiny
cornichons
like baby crocodiles, was served to each table, then the main course,
magret
, the thick fat rinded next to the dark red meat, and
pommes Charlotte
. Claudia was starving, she was always starving these days, it seemed, but she didn’t want to gobble with Alex sitting there,
after what he’d said. When the cheese and salad arrived she looked around to see how the Sternbachs were doing and noticed
with relief that Ella was lighting a cigarette. ‘I’ll just go and see if they’re OK,’ she told Alex, unwedging herself
from the bench, aware of the eyes on her breasts as she crossed the square.

‘I hope it’s not too awful for you,’ she said lightly, sitting down and extracting her own cigarettes from her bag. Ella handed
her a lighter.

‘No, no,’ said Otto seriously, ‘this is just what we came for.’

‘Really? I mean, this sort of thing interests you particularly?’ Perhaps he was a university professor, some sort of anthropologist,
not a medical doctor. She had thought that the Dutch would be too sensible to be charmed by a village
fête
.

‘Yes, I’m hoping to speak to some of those older people later. You see, we didn’t come here just for a holiday.’

‘Don’t be mysterious, Otto. And we’re very pleased with La Maison Bleue, as I said to Aisling. It’s lovely.’

Claudia felt she was being slow. They looked quizzical, this elegant older couple with their precise, accentless English,
quizzical and conspiratorial.

‘I came here to see if I could find out about my brother.’

‘Your brother? You have a French brother?’

‘Well, half French. My father was in the Army, yes, the German army. He was stationed here during the war and he had a child
with a local girl. He was killed, but he had written a letter to my mother.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Claudia didn’t think about whether she sounded sorry because Otto’s father had been a Nazi or an adulterer, or
just because he was dead. This was fascinating.

Ella looked impatient, as though her husband’s deliberate speech was too slow. ‘Otto’s father, well, it was the war. They’d
been training at Bordeaux and he met Otto’s mother there,
she was a nurse. Her name was Ursula. They married and when she became pregnant she returned to Germany. He was posted on,
and well, this happened. So he wrote to her, to make a clean breast of things. He said there was a little boy.’

‘And your mother, Otto? I thought you were Dutch, not German. Not that it matters, of course,’ she said hastily.

‘My mother had relatives in Antwerp and she went to them before the end of the war. She remarried and so I grew up there.’

‘And so this brother, you think he lives here?’

‘We don’t know exactly,’ Ella broke in again, excited by the story. ‘We’ve been to the records office at Monguèriac and the
Mairie
at Landi. Otto’s father didn’t say exactly where he was writing from, he couldn’t, but we know the name of his battalion,
and we’ve researched their movements. It was called
Das Reich.
’ Claudia thought that maybe Ella should lower her voice, considering where they were, but she was hurrying on. ‘Some divisions
were right here in 1943 and 1944. They had their headquarters at the chateau.’

‘Really? You know, I could introduce you to the Marquis, who lives there now. I know him from Paris. I’m sure he’d know something.’

‘There’s no guarantee the mother stayed here. There were terrible punishments for Frenchwomen who did as she did, though it
was very common. And if she did, she might be dead, or have remarried and moved away, had more children. We know so little.’

Claudia realized that this
Das Reic
h business must have something to do with the deaths in the village that Aisling had told her about. She thought of mentioning
Oriane
Aucordier as someone the Sternbachs might speak to, but that seemed horribly tactless.

‘It’s difficult to ask, too,’ added Ella. ‘Even though it was long ago, it doesn’t seem that way to many people. They were
quite rude at Monguèriac.’

Claudia wanted to ask what Otto intended to do if he found his brother, or how he would feel if this dreamed-of relative turned
out to be a Le Pen voter living in a breeze-block bungalow on the
lotissement
at Landi, but she did not wish to appear prying. She reiterated her offer of an introduction to the Marquis, adding that
today was not the best moment to bring the subject up, but that she could ring up later. In her interest and the satisfaction
of seeming a sort of insider she had forgotten her fear of Delphine.

The tightly packed tables had now relaxed and spread and she suggested they join the Harveys. Aisling was calling across the
table to Jonathan that the boys were going to miss the winner of the goat race. Claudia felt sorry for her. It was clear that
Aisling had not realized that her sons were no longer of an age to be genuinely charmed by a goat race, nor yet old enough
to fake it for her sake. Goat racing would be met with an embarrassment akin to physical pain. In between the clapping for
the boules cup, the church decorations, and the lap of honour of the triumphant goat, the Sternbachs were introduced.

‘We take guests too, you know,’ announced Mary Logan to Ella, ‘you must come over for dinner and test out the competition!’

‘Mary’s a fantastic cook,’ put in her husband, when no one else appeared to get up the energy for the anticipated compliment.

‘You have to taste my vichyssoise,’ she crowed.

‘I do like a nice leek and potato soup,’ said Otto politely, ‘Ella makes it very well.’

‘I’m not talking leek and potato soup! I’m talking vichyssoise!’ Mary glared at Otto with glazed sincerity, defying him to
contradict her.

‘Tell me,’ said Jean-Marc Lesprats, leaning forward aggressively to Jonathan, ‘what do you English want with so many toilets?’

Things got better when the band started up. As always happens at such events, sexagenarian couples waltzed with sprightly
elegance around the square and everyone said how marvellous it was, to try to compensate for their own ungainliness. Claudia
hated dancing with Alex, with English men in general, but she shuffled gamely through one with him and one with Jonathan.
Aisling looked pleased enough with Otto and then Dick Logan, who did a sort of swing that made him the best of the expat dancers,
but it was embarrassing that all the women drew the line so clearly at Malcolm Glover. It had grown dark, the air was soft
and smelt of jasmine, the chestnut tree was full of brightly coloured bulbs. Aisling and Claudia exchanged a satisfactory
roll of the eyes as they turned on the floor, indicating a good bitch about that appalling Mary woman later. Sitting out,
smoking, Claudia thought of what Otto had told her, and of how romantic the village seemed, timeless if one ignored the Shopi
frontage and the line of neon-stickered motos. Perhaps everything would be all right. In an access of goodwill she turned
to Madame Lesprats’ old relative, who was cheerfully sipping
at a brandy. ‘Are you having a nice time, Madame?’ she pronounced loudly.

‘Oh, it’s not bad.’

It occurred to Claudia that it was odd that Oriane Aucordier and Ginette were not there. This woman must be about Oriane’s
age, though it was hard to tell at this juncture of decay.

‘Tell me, do you know Oriane Aucordier? She told me about her brother, who was killed in the war.’ Perhaps she could find
out something about the scandal at the chateau? Her attempt was met with a vicious glare from the watery, almost colourless
old eyes, and Amélie turned her head deliberately away. Claudia felt foolish, but decided she had been misunderstood, the
old bat was probably senile anyway, and just then Charles-Louis d’Esceyrac came up and asked her to dance. She ground out
her cigarette and stepped up into his arms.

He held her correctly, as she had known he would, and as they danced he made it clear, lightly and without saying anything
at all, that he knew all about Sébastien and that he would be quite happy to offer himself as a replacement of sorts, in Paris,
if Claudia were that way inclined one day in the future. So Delphine had sneaked. Claudia laughed softly and minded less about
her dress, and surprised herself in the car on the short drive home with a vivid image of Charles-Louis fucking her. He was
sexy, in an old, Merchant Ivory sort of way. The image was accompanied by a sharp snap of desire, and then the now-familiar
knowledge that such things were no longer possible, and then back, bloodily, to Sébastien.

Alex wanted sex again that night. Claudia was tired, truly just tired, and she considered refusing him, but then she thought
of the time that refusing would take, and the sulks and the reassurance, and then she would probably end up doing it anyway.
She thought, as he shoved away, that sex was often a bit like netball at school. She had played centre for the team, or sometimes
goal attack. She hadn’t particularly liked netball, but she had been good at it, and it was easier to play for the team, to
go along to practice and the tedious Saturday afternoon tournaments, than to contrive a way of getting out of it. They were
all ‘good in bed’, she and her friends. They did all the things the magazines instructed them to do, oral, anal, cowgirl,
spanking, blindfolds. Like a list of prostitutes’ services. They sucked and they swallowed, they Kegeled and contorted. The
women Claudia knew did everything, with the same diligence they applied to getting their roots done or not missing spin class.
It was no big deal, just one more necessary component of being attractive. Claudia did not feel her own pleasure had been
much enhanced by any of these activities. Alex tried hard to please her, succeeded at first, but the fact was that she didn’t
fancy him any more. That was what was extraordinary about Sébastien, that she wanted him to fuck her so badly she didn’t care
if they went through the checklist. It didn’t even matter that he wasn’t all that good at it. She saw Sébastien’s face for
a moment, hovering above her, and she groaned in shame and anger as Alex came, so that was just as well.

Claudia was intrigued by the Sternbachs’ story. Playing detective wasn’t exactly her thing, but she felt sure that if she
tried to help them she would also find out more about Oriane and her son. Oriane had offered her something more than her surprising
empathy, a connection that Claudia grasped at as though it might in some way help her. Or if that was being woolly, then at
least it might be enough of a distraction to drown the white noise in her head. She tried to interest Olly and Richard, but
their complete lack of reaction reminded her that for them the war was a sort of fiction, a maniac spitting absurd speeches,
and the source of baddies in the movies. Wasn’t every child supposed to be an expert on the Holocaust? Richard did say that
she should probably talk to Madame Lesprats, who knew everything about everyone, and had about a million barmy old relations.
She lived next door to Kevin. He offered to show her on his bike.

Madame Lesprats lived in the new
lotissement
on the other side of Castroux.
Lotissements
were one of Aisling and Jonathan’s bêtes noirs. Aisling claimed that though they could not actually see the development from
Murblanc, she could feel its presence. Alex had pointed out that the farm people had to live somewhere, since the English
had bought all the nice old houses and priced them out of the market, but Aisling thought the government ought to have a scheme
or something. And anyway it was no good the French complaining now that all the property had been bought by foreigners, when
for years they had been happy to let their beautiful old houses fall to rack and ruin and live in concrete horrors in the
garden. The
lotissement
was certainly hideous. Many of the small houses were still raw terracotta breeze block, standing in plots of scorched mud,
made uglier by the bright plastic of discarded children’s toys and several giant paddling pools, sold as ‘
piscines
’
in Monsieur Bricolage. Each home was adorned with a satellite dish, stuck to the roof like a button on a hat.

The Lesprats’ house was older, it had been there long enough for a squat bushy hedge to grow up around the plot. The French
seemed to be obsessed with keeping nature out, surrounding themselves with topiary and evergreen, enclosing their homes like
giftwrapped packages from the disorder beyond. Madame Lesprats had positioned several plastic swans along the crazy paving
leading to the door, their backs grotesquely split and streaming with garish bougainvillea. Claudia wished for a moment that
Alex was with her, it was all so Chingford.