This Must Be the Place (21 page)

‘A self-destructive streak,’ Lucas corrects, mumbling through another mouthful.

‘Yes, that. I can see why Claudette fell for him, of course I can, but he is the archetypal self-destructive charmer. He cannot help himself. He feels on some level he doesn’t deserve her, doesn’t deserve all this. I have seen the type before.’

Several things happen at once. Her uncle shifts irritably in his seat, uncrossing and recrossing his legs, the edge of his socked foot coming into contact with Marithe’s arm. He says something to Pascaline, very fast, in French and Marithe catches the words
l’enfant
and
ici
and Marithe knows she has been found.

But Pascaline doesn’t stop. She merely switches into French.
‘Évidemment cela veut dire qu’il y a une autre femme. Qui vit dans le Sussex peut-être. L’homme ne –’

‘Oh, arrête,’
Lucas grumbles,
‘arrête.’

‘– peut pas résister. Nous devons nous demander comment protéger Claudette. Et s’il a dit à l’autre femme qui elle est et où elle habite. As-tv pensé à ça?’

Marithe sees that Pascaline doesn’t know or has forgotten that Claudette and Ari speak French together all the time. Marithe has grown up hearing the language, imbibing it from birth; it has spooled through her head for as long as she can remember. It is the secret language of her mother and her brother, that older, darker, almost-adult, who has suddenly gone from their house when he used to be here all the time, in the room opposite Marithe’s, and the pain of that disappearance, which she hadn’t known was coming, is so severe that she cannot always keep it in. She is sometimes compelled to stamp into the garden and fling clods of mud at the garden wall, hurl rocks at the old well, which her father hammered shut with planks of wood, but you can still hear its depth, its existence, in the echo, if you hit it in the right place, with the right stone.

Marithe shoots out from under the table, a blur of nightdress, socks, unravelling plaits and, ignoring the cries and admonishments of her uncle and grandmother, runs across the room, weaving through furniture, past playpen and stove, past the dog, who has caught something of her motion and thinks that an adventure is in the offing, past the stacked dishes of the kitchen and out of the back door.

She leaps from the worn stone of the step, stamping on some wellington boots, and stands for a moment, poised at the edge of the lawn. The air is moist, heavy with unfallen rain. The tops of the mountains are swathed in scarves of soft grey.

What to do, which way to go? Climb the aspens, splash through the stream, feed the hens, visit the treehouse, head for the tyre-swing, build a fire, go to the fairy den that Ari made for her last summer, search for smooth pebbles in the water butt, find one of those reeds that Lucas knows how to pierce in the right place to make a music pipe. The world seems to Marithe to be suddenly crammed, overloaded, a spectrum of possibilities. How can she choose just one, how can she ever decide which way to turn, when the place is so full, so teeming with choice? There is a fire raging somewhere within her, it seems, and none of these things can put it out.

She moves sideways along the path, one foot crossing over the other, ‘sidling’, it’s called, her father told her – ‘Good word, huh?’ he had said, with a wink – and she takes care that the dew-drenched flowers don’t catch and clutch at her hem. Nothing slows you down like a wet nightdress. At the corner of the house, she pauses to do up every last button of her cardigan, right to the top. It doesn’t seem so long since it was summer, since she was out here in the garden in nothing at all, since her mother sat feeding Calvin on a rug on the lawn, but now the air is sharp, her breath leaving her in white explosions.

Just coming into view now is the well. Marithe eyes it, as you might a sleeping enemy. Her father took some planks from the barn – her mother had been annoyed when she saw, said she had been saving them for something – and hammered them down over the wet, mossy mouth. Marithe thinks she can remember what the well looked like before, when it used to open, when the cover used to lift off. Someone – was it Ari, her father, her mother? – had lifted her so she could see down, down, down, a tunnel into the earth and there, at the bottom, was a distant, watery girl, gazing back up at her.

It must have been Ari who lifted her. Marithe has a memory of her father sprinting out of the house towards them, shouting something, snatching off his reading glasses and chopping them down through the air. No, he was saying, no, get away from there, put her down, and Ari saying, s-s-s-sorry, s-s-sorrysorry.

Marithe bends at the knees, selects a stone from the path and hurls it towards the covered well. Its arc, she sees, as soon as it leaves her hand, is all wrong. Too high, too short. It falls between her and the well. Marithe sighs.

The words
une autre femme
slide unbidden through her head. She turns her head, first one way then the other, almost as if she expects someone near her to have spoken them aloud. But she is alone. She mouths the words silently, making them into one continuous sound, then separating them into three.
Une autre femme
.

She bends and tries another stone, then another, but both of them veer off to the side and she hurls a handful, wildly, up into the air, without even bothering to see where they land.

She runs. Around the house, past the aspens, past the fairy den, past the barn, where she catches a glimpse of her mother’s feet in workboots, high up on the tiles, the leather toolbelt that Marithe covets and is sometimes allowed to touch.

She arrives at the door of the henhouse, breathless and hot. The hens are crowding and groaning at the wire, turning upon her their beaded, glistening eyes. They have a hen each, she and Ari and Calvin. Marithe’s is tawny, with a red comb and yellow feet, Calvin’s black and Ari’s white.

She unlatches the door and scatters the feed on the ground. Calvin’s is first out, clawed feet held fastidiously high, a throaty tutting coming from the glossy throat, then hers. At the sight of Ari’s white hen hesitating, scratching, then plucking at the feed, the fire that has been burning away inside Marithe seems to flare and crackle.

‘No,’ she says, to the white hen. ‘No, you don’t.’

She picks up the hen, her fingers closing about the breast feathers, and the ugliness of what she is about to do seems only to fuel the fire. The frail heartbeat flutters under her hands.

She flings the hen back into the henhouse and slams the door. The hen stumbles on contact with the ground, the soft curve of its breast pitching into the dust, but it rights itself and struts in a circle, letting out a mournful croon.

Marithe watches the remaining two hens eating the feed. She cannot look at Ari’s hen. She cannot. The sight of it falling like that into the dirt, its little legs folding: her fault, all her fault. And Ari had asked her to look after the hen while he was away. Her, not their mother, not their father.

The wail seems to come from somewhere else. It isn’t her making that noise, no. It must be some creature somewhere, in pain, in grief. All Marithe knows is that she is stumbling in her mismatched wellingtons away from the henhouse, towards the trees, and the grey scarves have unravelled from the mountains and the aspens are letting fall a shower of yellowing leaves and her mother is there. Her mother is there. She is catching Marithe in her arms and Marithe is being lifted off the ground and pressed into her mother’s neck, her mother’s heavy rope of hair. What happened, her mother is asking, are you hurt, did you fall, show me, show me where it hurts.

‘I was … I was horrible,’ Marithe sobs into her mother’s sweater.

‘You were horrible?’

‘To –’ she can barely say the name: oh, how awful, the way the bird stumbled like that ‘– to – to Iceberg.’

‘To who?’

‘Iceberg.’

Her mother sits down on the wall, with Marithe on her knee, her arms clasped about her in a circle. Marithe presses her face into the interlocked wool of her mother’s sleeve.

‘What did you do?’ her mother asks.

‘I – I –’ even to say it is too dreadful ‘– I didn’t let her eat. I shut her back in the henhouse.’

Her mother takes her face in both hands and tilts it up. She regards Marithe for a long moment, and when she does this, Marithe knows she is looking down, right to the bottom of her, that her mother can see all of her and thinks it will be OK.

‘When is he coming back?’ Marithe asks.

Her mother continues to look into her eyes. ‘When is who coming back?’

Marithe glances away, at the gravel of the path, at the tools slotted into her mother’s toolbelt. She picks at a loose thread in her mother’s cuff. ‘Ari,’ she says.

‘Half-term,’ her mother says. ‘Three weeks from now. Twenty-one sleeps. So, not too long to wait.’ She stands and puts Marithe back on her feet.

‘Would you like to go and let Iceberg out?’

Marithe nods. She takes several steps towards the henhouse, then turns.

Her mother is still there, watching her, hands resting on her tools. She smiles at her and nods, once, in encouragement, in acceptance.

‘What is a self-destructive streak and why is another woman a bad thing?’ Marithe asks.

Her mother’s face becomes puzzled. ‘What was that?’

‘Another woman. Why is another woman a bad thing?’ Marithe sees that her mother still looks confused so she says it in French as well. ‘
Une autre femme
.’

‘What makes you ask that?’

‘Pascaline was saying it. To Lucas.’

Without a word, her mother turns and sets off towards the house. ‘
Maman
?’ she yells. ‘
Maman!
Qu’est-ce que tu racontes?
’ And now the secret language is shouted and fast, and Marithe cannot grasp it: it’s too slippery, too eel-like, it spools past at a terrific rate. Lucas is coming out of the back door after his mother and the three of them stand in the middle of the lawn, Pascaline and Claudette facing one another, Lucas trying to get in between.

Marithe turns away from them and goes slowly towards the henhouse where Iceberg is waiting, her head cocked to one side, her moist black eye full only of trust, of faith, of certainty.

Severed Heads and Chemically Preserved Grouse

Todd, the Scottish Borders, 1986

A
wedding.

The bride and groom are young, newly graduated, and have the kind of open good looks that will last them a few more decades. They will be successful; they will have good-looking children; their house will have white floors, cabinets of glassware and bright toys in baskets. Their walls will display scenes from this day: their former selves, posing beside a lake, in an artful line with their families, in the centre of their group of friends. The bride will wish, in years to come, that she hadn’t listened to her sister in the matter of eyeshadow colour. Did her sister deliberately derail her appearance on this, the most important day of her life, by suggesting the moss green, which drained all hue from her complexion? Or was it an accident? The groom will rarely look at the photographs and, when he does, will be struck most by how many of the guests – considered, at the time, to be crucial presences in his life – he no longer sees.

What neither of them can know, looking at these photos of people dressed in their best, holding themselves together, presenting their faces and smiles to the camera, is how much their wedding, coming so soon after graduation, so early in their twenties, set off ripples of paranoia and fear among their peers.

Is this how it will be now? the lines of younger guests in the photograph are thinking, as they smile and pose, as they hold up their champagne glasses to the camera. Are people starting to get married? Have they really reached that age? Are they to attend weddings at weekends? Is this the start of it all? A strange parade of ceremonies, rehearsal dinners, line-ups, after-parties, their friends unrecognisable in stiff, elaborate dresses and immovable hairdos. The unfathomable lists of required items. What are fish forks and butter knives and occasional vases, and why do their friends need them, and why must they buy them in exchange for attending this peculiar event?

The bride’s father does something important in a bank (no one is entirely clear on this point) and the wedding is taking place in the borders of Scotland, a locale the majority of the guests have never visited. There is, here, a turreted, moated country house, surrounded by woods so dense and green they have a vaguely menacing, fairy-tale air, crowding in where the manicured lawns of the house stop. One would do well not to wander into them, not to stray from the paths, not to follow music you might hear from somewhere among the trees.

Peacocks pick their way over the gravelled drive and scream at their reflections in the parked cars. It is quite a lot colder than most of the non-Scottish guests – that is to say, the younger crowd, the couple’s friends – would have expected for June. The women, no more than girls, shiver in the mist that seems to roll all day long off the loch, in through the forests, their flesh goosebumped under their thin, short dresses, their ankles mauve above their strapped heels. The ones who thought to bring shawls or jackets clutch the fabric about themselves. The men cup their cigarettes in their hands, as if for warmth, shoulders raised inside the inadequate cloth of their hired suits.

They have travelled up, in groups, the previous night, from London and the south, some, the more organised ones, by train, the others in an assortment of cars, borrowed mostly from friends or siblings. They stopped, noisily, at various places on the way: York, then an unsuspecting village in Northumberland, at Holy Island, where they disembarked from their vehicles and waded off the causeway into the encroaching tide. They paused at service stations to buy crisps and chocolate, magazines and deodorant, cigarettes and contraceptives. They behaved, every one of them, in all of these places, in a manner so raucous it verged on shrill, so uninhibited it suggested hysteria. Someone got hold of a can of shaving foam and covered another’s car in white froth. The men picked up the women and they had a piggyback race to the toilets. A felt-pen was acquired from somewhere and anyone sleeping was decorated with a black moustache.