White Lies

Yannick was standing in the yard hitching his trousers up. He looked like a kid pushed into something he didn’t want to do. He saw the English number plate on our vehicle and started looking at the barn roofs and the treetops. He called behind him: eh, Gilles … Gilles came round the side, lighting a stub on his lip, flick-knife on the belt of his black leather trousers, matching black hair larded flat over a face like a grindstone.

Joy still did all the talking, but I was beginning to pick up a word here and there. They were looking for les auges, old granite troughs. Yannick must’ve noticed we had barns full of camelote. He was standing by one auge which had sunk to its rims on the edge of what might once have been a garden. Gilles was already trying to lever it out with his spinning-wheel fingers. Yannick offered us a hundred francs. Joy was a tough dealer. She’d stand her ground, pull her sleeves down, hook a thumb through the hole and talk with her hands like she was a French widow weighing melons. We had six auges, so Yannick knew we must have six of everything else. Le Haut Bois was like a museum.

He said his client was a Parisien, a mine d’or but an asshole. She would pay a thousand francs cash for the big auges, five hundred for the small ones, then stick them in her garden and set them up with supermarket geraniums. Joy said moitié-moitié, fifty-fifty. All this time I was wondering what the pendant round Yannick’s neck was, jigging on a chain. It looked like a big bearded face made of gold-painted tin, the top off a jelly mould. Gilles was brushing greenery off his trouser leg. He wasn’t dressed for agricultural tackle collecting. He was a towner, probably from Flers, but Yannick was dressed from a bin bag left at the clothes recycling bin, grey joggings with knees like camel humps and a green acrylic jumper with pulled threads.

Five of the auges were too heavy to lift, even with four of us. So as Yannick backed his van round the yard and burnt his clutch, we levered each auge out with these eight-foot iron bars we’d found in the cider barn. Then with planks and rollers we’d heave and drag them into the van till it sagged in the mud. It was nearly dark when we finished. We sat at the table for a coup, a home-brew winter warmer. Everything Yannick saw, he asked how much, saying he’d just opened a brocante in the old primary school at Ste-Honorine. Ste-Honorine was a one-horse-trough village seven kilometres east with a tractor mechanic, a church and a boulangerie. There were mud houses where old women still slopped out, and a stray dog running across the road with a chicken in its mouth.

We’d seen his brocante, L’Atelier de Merlin. He’d hung two old chairs from the brackets of his upstairs windowbox and draped a hand-painted banner across the road. It looked like the place had shut down years back, but he was just waiting for his enterprise loan to come through. Even his van was rented. I wanted to let him in the barns but Joy didn’t. Gilles kept asking Joy where she was from, why didn’t she smoke, when was she going to have children. Yannick wanted to know if Scotland was a good place to find camelote. Him and Gilles were going there next month. I didn’t believe a word of it. We got two hundred quid for the auges though.

On the day of the break-in I was supposed to stay out from midday till bedtime. I did a sausage and chips at Leclerc in Argentan followed by a weekly shop which I managed to spin out till 4 p.m. The shopping was an emotional gamble. Just three weeks before, me and Joy had gone Christmas shopping there. It had been so cold that day the condensation drips inside the Land Rover froze into rivets of ice. Joy’s hands were blue inside her mittens and I felt sick. When we’d got home Joy said: what are we going to do? We can’t go on like this.

I’d begun to frame everything she said in my own scheme of things, like those template marker systems for multiple choice. For my own peace of mind ‘what are we going to do?’ meant: how are we going to get warm? ‘We can’t go on like this’ meant: we must get proper firewood. I still thought we were brave and authentic in letting ourselves slip down the evolutionary scale. From benefits to hunter-gatherers and, by that winter, scavengers. By nightfall on our last few days together, the cold was dangerous, minus sixteen. Our firewood pile was scrap from dumps, hedgerows and collapsed buildings. It had nails, rusty iron hinges, staples and barbed wire in it. It was frozen now and weighed twice what it should. It snapped the teeth off our chainsaw so we couldn’t cut it to size for the stove. Instead, we made an inferno in the open fireplace, pulled up our stolen armchairs and cooked on trivets and cauldrons.

So I had no appetite for buying food at Leclerc that day. My trolley looked like the one parked near the exits, the one with the cardboard sign tied on with string: Red Cross, give a tin to the poor. Gone were the falafals and yoghurt, the corn pone bread and salads of marriage. In came the tins of sauerkraut, cheap blended wine in consigned litre bottles, tinned fish and tinned peas. I scooped up two bags of potato chips big as coal sacks.

I turned into the yard at midnight, expecting just a smashed window and some paltry disarray, but Le Haut Bois had been ransacked. It was like the house had regurgitated the previous hundred and fifty years, turned all the treasure it once contained back into rubbish. It looked just like it had the day we’d moved in, Juliette Macé’s sick-house, the windowsill rotting beside her bed, rats gnawing on the floorboards, mouldy black slug trails across the plaster and that sweet, deathly cloying dry decomposure.

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