The House with Blue Shutters (31 page)

Papie could not say he had been treated badly. They had brought him soup and bread at what he guessed was midday, and a slice
of omelette later. He had been given a blanket to sleep on, and when they had opened the door after the hours until morning
had dozed past, there was a bowl of water to wash in, cold but with a clean towel, and more bread, even warm coffee. Still,
he was cold and hungry. It was hard to keep track of the time going by, in the darkness, and the stool was so uncomfortable
he had propped himself on the stone flags with the blanket rolled into a bolster. He had relieved himself several times into
the pot, and though he had tried to carry it to the furthest corner of the cellar, some of it had slopped and spilled, and
he was disgusted by the smell, ashamed that they would see he had soiled the floor. His legs hurt, deep in the marrow, though
he tried to walk up and down every now and then to stay warm. He slipped in and out of sleep, though never so thoroughly that
when he opened his eyes to find merely a different quality of darkness he did not know immediately where he was. The last
few times he had felt tears in his eyes and made a groaning sort of sound that surprised him in the silence and the black.
He was still not exactly afraid, though he could not understand why nothing had happened, why no one had come for him. He
grew wearier and wearier and the time spent staring dully at the sinking candle shrank to shorter intervals.

When the door opened again, he had no idea of how much time had passed, though his bladder was aching and he felt dizzy as
he pushed himself effortfully from the floor. The candle was gone, and he blinked into the dull yellow light
from the passage. One of them was speaking in thickly accented French. ‘In here.’

Two figures moved towards him, darkly dressed, one of them holding up an oil lamp.

‘Hercule Nadl?’ They were French, thank God. Papie peered up at them eagerly, stretched his hands towards the first man as
though the other might help him to stand. In the lamp light he could see their uniforms.
Milice
.

‘Have you come to get me out?’

‘Not likely. Contraband brewing is a serious offence.’ It was the young one who spoke. Deliberately, Papie let his eyes travel
to the holster at the boy’s waist.

‘Given you a real gun, have they? Call yourselves Frenchmen?’ Papie sucked his cheeks for a good gob and spat accurately on
the polished boots.

‘Watch it, you old bastard.’

Papie stood as straight as he could manage. ‘How old are you? ’Bout twenty-five? Where was your mother in 1918? Spreading
her legs for the Boche, was she?’

There was no time for his satisfaction in the remark to be replaced by surprise as the butt of the pistol cracked up against
his jaw.

The goats were eating hay now, it was so bleak there was nothing else left for them. Oriane thought it would be as well to
get the last of it down to the floor of the barn before she got too big to be climbing ladders. There was no one about to
help, but she could roll the bales over the edge, and if they split so much the better. It was hard to force herself out into
the yard again. When she had let the chickens out earlier the wind had been so bitter her face felt scalded with it. She was
so tired, all she wanted to do was sit quiet, as close to the fire as she could. She told herself not to be lazy, and took
one of William’s grubby jerseys from the hook behind the door, pulling it down over her wrists and bunching the wool around
her fingers. She climbed the ladder more carefully than usual, conscious of every step, so when she saw Monsieur Boissière
sitting in the straw at the top her first sensation was anger, that the shock could have made her slip.

The schoolteacher looked extremely cold and miserable, as did Jean Charrot, Nic Dubois, and Marcel Vionne, who were
hunched up with their arms around their knees and their caps pulled down over their faces, staring at the plank floor of the
loft.

‘Oh, it’s you, Oriane,’ said Monsieur Boissière, sounding relieved.

‘Well, I do live here. What’s all this, Monsieur Boissière?’

‘Shh, you can’t call me that!’

‘Why ever not? What am I supposed to call you? Does Madame Boissière know you’re here, sir? And what about you lot?’ she finished
in Occitan.

Oriane thought that they must have got drunk together, somehow, and rolled home along the Cahors road, stopping to sleep it
off. But what would the schoolteacher be doing, boozing with lads from the village?

‘Laurent said—’

Marcel interrupted with obvious relish, ‘Remember, Prof.’

‘Ah, yes, La Moto said, we had to stay here until further instructions.’

‘La Moto? Monsieur Boissière, I’m sorry to ask, but have you had a few glasses?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘Or anything to eat, come to that,’ put in Nic.

‘Shut up, Ceba.’

‘Ceba? Onion?’ Oriane put her hands on her hips. ‘Get out, the lot of you. You should be ashamed, Monsieur Boissière, showing
yourself up. Just you go home to your wife now. And as for you three, your mothers will be hearing about this. Go on, out!’

‘Oriane, we really can’t. Up there, the tents. We can’t be seen on the road.’

‘Is this business to do with Papie Nadl, then?’

‘You could say that.’

‘And you want to stay here? You could come into the kitchen you know. There’s no sense freezing out here.’

‘We can’t.’

‘Well, make yourselves useful then. You three, get that lot of hay down for me. It’ll warm you up. I suppose I’ll go and see
if there’s some soup in the house, will I?’

They nodded sheepishly, tired little boys, but later, when she returned for the empty soup pot, the hay was on the floor of
the barn, and the four men were gone.

‘He’s pissed himself.’

‘Never mind that. Is he breathing?’

‘I don’t know. I think he hit his head. Look. We shouldn’t of did it, Thierry, we shouldn’t of come.’

Eric felt his arms wet with moisture, though his skin felt strangely hot in the freezing air of the cellar. He started to
cry. ‘I think we’ve killed him, Thierry. You killed him, you did.’

The bones of Thierry’s face stood out sharp in the lamp light, his eyes were bright pinpricks and his breath came rapidly,
as though he had been running. Eric sat on the floor next to the old man’s body and hid his face in his arms, gasping. Thierry
kicked at him savagely. ‘Get up, get up, you stupid cunt. We have to get him out, put him in the truck. Move!’

The sour smelling form huddled in the damp blanket was pathetically light. Eric supported it under one shoulder, cooperating
at least, though his face was dazed and smeared with tears. Thierry’s thoughts were already moving ahead, probing the walk
across the yard. They would have to get rid
of it. There were plenty of places they could hide it, up on the plain, one of the shepherds’ huts, maybe, where no one would
come until the spring. Eric wouldn’t talk, he was sure of that, though he needed a story he could understand, something he
could go along with.

‘We could say he was a Communist,’ said Eric doubtfully, ‘like that schoolteacher.’

Thierry considered. There was no way they could get the body out of the chateau unnoticed, no possibility of merely hiding
it and expecting it to vanish. He spoke gently to Eric, his own fear passed.

‘There’s no need. We didn’t kill him. He’s old, he was probably a bit frightened. His heart gave out when he, when he fell.
That’s all.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes. It’s a shame. We’ll make a report, then we’ll get on home.’

Von Scheurenberg was able to notice, from the part of himself that somehow stood back from all that was happening, the significance
of his own lack of dismay. He would have bawled them out once, these two snivelling incompetents in their pathetic uniforms,
but as it was he simply needed them to be gone. It wasn’t important any more, one old man.

‘Tell them to see the mayor, then,’ he told Hummel swiftly. ‘Then get him home. They’d better take Sternbach to translate.
Just get the lot of them out of my sight.’

Hummel clicked his heels and the door closed. Von Scheurenberg looked at his watch and saw that it was several hours before
he could decently have a drink.

When Laurent arrived back at Murblanc that night, pleased with what he had accomplished, it was to find his mother and Cathérine
sitting shocked in the kitchen. They had not even lit a lamp. Papie lay stretched out on the table. There was no need for
an explanation.

‘William was here,’ said Cathérine. ‘He kept trying to wake Papie up.’

Laurent looked at his grandfather, shrivelled and broken. As far as he knew, the old man had never done harm to anyone. His
mother was weeping behind her hands.

‘Go for the priest,’ he told his mother. ‘Cathérine, put me a clean shirt and something to eat in a bag. I have to go out,
but I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

He approached his mother, trying to think of some words of comfort, but he settled for touching her gently on the shoulder.
She did not look up.

Outside, as he kicked the bike into life, he could feel the sweat on his skin turning to ice. He knew he wouldn’t find JC
in Cahors, but if he waited a while, he would find someone who could. Papie’s donkeys raised their heads at him as he rode
up the lane, and he looked for their sad patient eyes in the dark.

François twisted in his blanket and looked around the low room. The moon was so bright through the one tiny window that he
could clearly see the smoke-stained beams standing out on the whitewashed ceiling. The other three appeared to be sleeping.
At least it was finally warm. They had come to Aucordier’s, two of the strange brothers he had noticed so long ago at the
dance in the barn. He didn’t know their real names. The older called himself Pastre, the younger, whose eyes were peculiar,
one brown and one blue, huge and startled in his wan face, said he was Lebre. ‘Hare,’ Marcel had told him. They had filed
in silence down the rise where Oriane Aucordier kept her goats and then tracked along the hedgerows to the river. The two
brothers had hardly broken their stride, just waded in, though the stream was running strong and the painful water was waist
deep. François’s trousers were stiff as they began to climb towards Saintonge, emerging from the fields to cross the road
at a run below the Chauvignat place, then along a cart track for a while until Pastre pointed to a
tiny path that wandered off through the chalk. They took it as the night fell around them, panting and stumbling with only
the steady sound of the brothers’ boots ahead to keep them in line. After what seemed like an hour or so, François felt the
trees recede and the moonlight came clear.

They were in a hollow, with two ivy-covered ghosts of houses, a suggestion of walls and a doorway, and beside them a tiny
hump of a building with a cross standing out clear from the roof against the sky. The doorway was a round, elfin-sized arch
with an empty niche beside it. François guessed this must be one of the ancient chapels on the pilgrim route, forgotten for
a thousand years. The brothers passed on, disappearing into the thick wood. When François and the others came up, stumbling,
they saw a low house, the ground floor banked so deep into the earth that only half its wooden door was visible, with a flight
of stone steps in the old manner leading to the second floor. There was one room, not even a fireplace, just a hole in the
ceiling. Beneath them, unseen animals stirred, the grassy mildewed breath of cows and the sharp stink of goat.

Pastre and Lebre lit a candle stuck into a saucer, took some ancient bread from a wooden press and warmed a thin, greasy soup
in an iron cauldron over a trivet set on the heap of smouldering charcoal, which filled the room with a thick woody stench.
The bread was edible soaked in the sour liquid, and they passed around a jug of wine, drinking straight from the lip. The
brothers solemnly handed each of them a blanket, then took themselves to sleep at one end of the room. Beyond their names,
they had not spoken a word. François thought of Charlotte, of when he might see her again. Though he tried,
he was unable to believe that this was anything more than an adventure, a sort of camping trip that he might have undertaken
with his pupils, Baden-Powell style. Perhaps because if he believed it, he would have to begin to be afraid.

They stayed a week at the hamlet before Laurent and the other one came. François wound his watch carefully every evening,
since they were buried so deep here they could hear no church bells and it was his only way of counting the days. With nothing
to read, he was wretchedly bored. The lads, Nic, Marcel and Jean, or Ceba, Nenet and Pan as he tried to call them, seemed
unconcerned by the total lack of distraction. They helped Pastre and Lebre with the two cows and four goats, mucking out the
filthy byre, collecting firewood from the perimeter of the clearing, then sitting silent for hours, dozing and staring at
the coals, or playing hand after hand of cards. The living space reeked with tobacco and the salty, cheesy fug of six men.
François insisted they boil water in the cauldron each day to wash at least their hands and faces, which seemed a novelty
to Pastre and Lebre, but there was no means of shaving and the prospect of a strip wash in the slashing, icy wind was unbearable.
He grew used to the stench, and it was preferable to shivering outside and looking at the mud.