The House with Blue Shutters (3 page)

Sophie Aucordier rarely takes her children as far as the village. They go to Mass on the Days of Obligation, but do not linger
about gossiping afterwards in the square. When Oriane goes to the school she is to come straight home immediately, for the
devil finds work for idle hands. Sophie suspects that she may have married the devil, and even though she saw him expire with
her own two eyes, yellow and shrivelled and muttering about the fiends hidden in the walls, she would not be surprised if
the demons grew tired of his company and sent him back to torment her. So she remains vigilant, because decency and hard work
will preserve her. No children come up so far as Aucordier’s begging for eggs for May Day; on the first of the year Papie
Nadl walks his wreathed donkey straight down the hill, leaving Oriane and William to the mercies of the Israelites. Sophie
Aucordier keeps herself to herself and the village lets her, confirming her belief that the world is a cold, uncharitable
place, making a sorry little virtue of her loneliness. William is the proof that she has no right to joy, and in the still
summertime, when the sound of Yves Contier’s accordion and Papie’s violin can be heard all the way up the valley, she puts
the bolster over her head. Oriane pretends not to hear her weeping.

Claudia’s resolution about Sébastien lasted until three o’clock the next morning. The dinner had been got through, and mercifully
Alex had been so tired after the drive and the drinking that he had gone straight to sleep. Claudia was longing for the relief
of tears, the tension was balled in her lungs, but in a sudden, terrible intimation of what marriage could be like, she lay
raw-eyed in the darkness and realized she would have to find somewhere to cry.

The silence around her was vacant and terrifying. In London, a day could be filled with a walk across Kensington Gardens to
Hyde Park, a trip around Selfridge’s Food Hall to choose some wine for some fucking barbecue, then a crawling drive to Wandsworth
or Clapham. All of Alex’s friends seemed to work in the City and live in garden flats in South London, with wooden floors
and Ikea kitchens, expensive stereos and lurid eighties-yellow walls. The men were bankers or lawyers, as were most of the
women, with the occasional financial PR
or dim primary school teacher thrown in. The primary school teachers were usually prettier than the lawyers, but otherwise
Claudia had difficulty telling the couples apart, an inability that Alex claimed was pure affectation, but which struck her
sincerely at Sunday lunches or the dreaded barbecues, when she wasn’t certain whether she was talking to Anna solicitor who
lived with Tom banker or Lucy banker who lived with Gordon solicitor. Claudia was aware that everything about her, her clothes,
her job, even her cigarettes, was an anomaly in Alex’s circle, a distinction that had relieved her when she first began to
go out with him, but which tonight left her dumbly dismayed.

There was nothing wrong, she told herself over and over, with Alex’s friends. They were intelligent and well educated, more
intrinsically able, she felt, than herself. They travelled, for weekends in Europe and long trips to Asia or South America,
they skied and played tennis and went to the opera and the latest films, but Claudia nevertheless sounded a false note within
their cultivation, a boorishness that derived, she thought, from the fact that their ideas extended no further than the obviousness
of Sunday newspapers. She felt herself to be superior to them, although she had no logical right to, a superiority based,
she feared, on no more than the fact that nearly all of them were unattractive, the men paunchy or spotty, the girls thick
of chin and ankle, and hopelessly dressed. Claudia had the knowledge of her own beauty that comes easily from a lifetime of
admiration, she was precise about the extent and limitation of her power, grading it according to the groups in which she
moved. In Alex’s world it shone more brightly than in her own, where it was challenged occasionally,
by fashion models or the impeccable grooming of the women whom she taught.

Claudia worked in the education department of an old and distinguished auction house. Four days a week she lectured on British
Pictures from 1700 to the Present Day to small classes of earnest American graduate students, idly interested financiers’
wives (they of the impossibly manicured appearance) and an ever-evolving pool of easy Europeans, constant only in their cashmere,
who rarely lasted a full term, and who would politely disappear to Gstaad or St Tropez without ever appearing to feel that
their course constituted some sort of commitment. Claudia had written her postgraduate thesis at the Sorbonne, on Elisabeth
Vigée-Lebrun, and on Friday mornings she gave a class on history of art to the baccalaureate students at the French
lycée
in Kensington. She occasionally contributed a bilingual review or a short article to an expensively produced and little read
journal called
Diréctions
, edited by an old university friend, not because such work particularly pleased or suited her, but because it gave her access
to dinners with journalists and film people at the Groucho or Soho House, to fashion shows and talks at the ICA, and private
views in the East End. Her presence at these events, to which Alex of late had awkwardly and excitedly accompanied her, gave
her, she felt, some sort of status beyond that of a teacher, a sense of inhabiting a private and more engaging London than
the resolutely English city known to his friends.

There had been a dinner – Charlie and Fran? Emma and Henry? Sébastien’s book was lying on the Heal’s coffee table. For all
that its presence was like a prop in a bad film, it had
stabbed at her. His photograph was on the back cover, a Hollywood film version of the French intellectual. The men had already
gone through to the garden.

‘Are you reading this?’ Claudia asked.

‘I should. Did you see him on the telly?’

‘Yes,’ said Claudia.

‘Oh, God, of course, you probably know him. He is
so
gorgeous.’

‘I do know him,’ answered Claudia, ‘a little.’

She smoked too much and drank a bottle of Australian red by herself. There was a glabrous potato salad. Claudia watched Alex
eat it in the dying light. He pretended to mind about food, but she wondered sometimes if he knew what anything really tasted
like. Pudding was ice cream from an expensive box. All the time, Claudia had seen Sébastian’s face, the hollow above his collar
bone in the shadow of his jaw as he moved inside her in the dark. The image rasped at her like dust motes dancing in the tilt
and whistle of an invisible wind.

Claudia’s handbag slumped on a bentwood chair, carefully repainted and then distressed by Aisling. Sandpaper, she said. Claudia
took the bag in both hands, so it shouldn’t clink, and went back to the bathroom. Then she lay face down on the floor and
wept. For a while, she was unconscious of the sound she made, then gradually the high keening that had hummed and pushed in
her ears since she had woken was released, and she heard it away from her, like a ship’s horn caught across a beach, coming
closer and closer until it subsided into great hissing sobs that crossed her like blows. She gasped for air and rolled on
to her side. Here I am, she thought. On the floor in the bathroom. She sat up and pushed her hair with wet hands
from her wet face, saying nothing to herself. In her bag, tucked into a book Sébastien had given her, was the letter he had
sent. The book was a beautiful edition of John Donne’s poems, over a hundred years old. The letter said:

My darling Claudia
,

Alarms and excursions. I am so sorry that you left Paris that way. I am sorry, also, that we had the conversation we had,
and if I loved anyone at all, my own, it would be you. I don’t see the inevitability of our parting any more than I see the
inevitability of that, but I am sorrily flattered when you say you could not bear it. I don’t think, though, that I told you,
when you forced me, anything you had not known when we met. You know where I am, my love.

Ever your
,

S x

Claudia looked at the letter for an hour, the last five minutes of which she saw go by on her watch. She tried to get a signal
on her mobile, but was reduced to slithering painstakingly downstairs to the phone in the kitchen. At precisely three a.m.,
she dialled his flat in Paris. He would be up, he liked to work at night. She whispered that she was sorry, that she had not
meant to be so pleading, so undignified, that he ought to know her better than that, that she didn’t know what had come over
her and that she had decided to marry Alex. They had laughed about Alex in bed together. They called him Old Faithful. Sébastien
said, ‘Well, lucky Old Faithful. Shall you be a faithful spouse?’

‘Terribly,’ said Claudia. ‘You’re invited to dance at my wedding, of course.’ They laughed.

Claudia went back to bed with a glass of water as a prop and surprised herself by falling asleep rather quickly.

Claudia’s hair was the colour of acacia honey, thought Aisling, and she was quite insufferable. It was Friday, changeover
day. Aisling was doing what she called ‘the chapel walk’, a path that led up through the woods behind Murblanc and passed
a small, pink brick church whose foundations, according to a sad little printed card, were Roman. It was displayed with the
modest and, to Aisling, infuriating diffidence to tourist attractions so typical of the region. The track looped around the
plain square block of Aucordier’s farm, isolated on the high purple-grey plain, where ancient Mademoiselle Oriane lived alone
– except for poor Ginette, who came occasionally to help Madame Lesprats with the ironing – and then doubled back along a
poplar avenue to the Castroux road, dipping towards the river and a wonderful view of Murblanc on the right, which Aisling
had photographed for her brochure. There was smoke rising from Aucordier’s, scenting the still air with a brief autumnal reminder
of mouldering wood, but Aisling was alone today in the landscape, her figure progressing across the ridge with the permanence
of an illumination from a mediaeval book of hours. The idea soothed her, gave a resonance to the contact of her feet with
the ancient road, a little pilgrim marching stolidly beneath a bright sky bordered in golden curlicues and peacocks entwined
in mounting, green-inked boughs. There seemed always to be a breeze in the poplar avenue, and their branches today made a
sound like water rushing far away. ‘Soughing,’ thought Aisling, pleased with the justice of her word, and she stretched her
arms so that her knuckles met behind her back, and turned her face up to the sky, breathing the remaining freshness of the
morning, which still smelt green, though throbbing already with the gold promise of the heat.

Aisling had been up at seven, diligently seeing off the ghastly Lawses before their long cross-country drive. As she crossed
back from la Maison Bleue, she heard Madame Lesprats’ car pulling in at the bottom of the hill, and thought that she should
really have brought the fresh linen for the turnover down with her, to save Madame Lesprats, who was at least sixty, a hot
climb. Yet she felt selfish today, a little careless, and wanted to be away from the house before anyone woke up to claim
her. It was Claudia’s tone, she decided, which had so ruffled her, an imprecise suggestion of patronage. Too small to be in
any way reasonable to mention in bed to Jonathan after dinner, and unkind perhaps, as the girl was probably nervous, uncertain
before what was after all to be her new family, though Aisling didn’t in the least believe that, didn’t believe that Claudia
was the sort of person who was ever nervous. She had said to Jonathan, ‘What do you think?’ hoping that if he, too, had some
reservation, she might be able to analyse her own aloud. But he was muffled with drink,
digestifs
and red wine on top of the vintage champagne that Alex had produced with City-ish ostentation to toast the engagement, and
had only said, ‘Seems like Alex has done pretty well’. Aisling understood this clearly to imply that he found Claudia sexy,
too sexy to mention. Jonathan only felt it safe to comment on women’s looks when they did not interest him. He thought this
prudent and diplomatic, without realizing that Aisling was perfectly aware that if he said a woman was ‘very attractive’,
it meant that he didn’t really think so. He had no idea that the quality of his silences was a more precise indication of
interest than if he had denied having noticed that a woman had any allure.

Claudia was very pretty, Aisling recognized, pretty enough for it to be surprising, almost, that she should be with Alex,
but jealousy was not the source of her discomfort. Aisling had never had any claim to be particularly good-looking, had been
sensibly aware of the fact since she was quite young, and had simply made the best of herself so as not to look, as her own
mother would have put it, ‘a fright’. She took care with her clothes, her hair and her make-up, but with little vanity, content
that she should look nice and not aspiring to more. Rancour at other, more beautiful women had never troubled her, and now,
at forty-two, this calmness about her appearance gave her an attractiveness that other women of her age who had perhaps been
far more so a few years ago might be glad to possess. Having no special looks to lose, Aisling did not make the mistake of
trying with pathetic tenacity to retain them. Her figure had always been average, but was little changed after two pregnancies,
and she was fit from walking, gardening and swimming. She never dieted, or squeezed herself into unflattering clothes a size
too small. Her hands were protected by gloves and lotion when she worked outside, and though she guarded her fair skin from
the sun, she did not mourn the wrinkles around her eyes or the grooves that ran from her nose to the edge of her lips. The
other English women she knew from around Landi seemed to fall into two categories. There was a depressing carelessness, like
her friend Charlotte Glover, who occasionally ornamented her shapeless
blouses and sensible slacks with an ill-advised scarf or slash of lipstick, which served to accentuate her general grubbiness.
Equally depressing was the attempt at glamour, spongy pink bodies, bloated with alcohol and idleness, spilling out of brief
bikinis, low-cut tops and too much hard jewellery. In comparison, Aisling felt quite satisfied with her own appearance, which
she judged in the language of her magazines to be elegant and understated. Jonathan usually complimented her when they dressed
up to go to a dinner party or an occasional concert in Toulouse, and in groups with other husbands she felt less invisible
than she had at twenty.