Nightingale

She stared, eyes wider than usual. ‘Won’t you eat?’ she asked.

‘I’m not hungry.’ Half-drunk bottle in his hand, he crossed the room.

‘Where are you going?’

‘For a drive,’ he said.

‘At this time? Whatever for?’

‘I feel like it.’

‘Henri!’ she cried again, and looked down, her lips pursed tight. ‘All right. Of course. Well, I’ll leave your food out, okay? I’ll wrap it up so Jojo doesn’t eat it. You can have it in a little bit. You must need it.’

‘Maybe.’

He walked to the truck, pushing aside Jojo as she tried to come with him. He could feel great walls of inevitability closing in on every side, almost tangible. He tried to resist for a moment, considered turning back towards the house. But then he imagined the night ahead of him, sitting downstairs until he knew Brigitte was asleep, crawling into their bed next to her slack snores. That was too dismal, and his hunger too deep.

It took twenty minutes to drive to Edgar’s – usually enough time for Henri to question his decision at least three times, but not tonight. As he drove, his third beer and the cool air rushing through the windows made his head light and calm. No more indecision, and no more rage.

He pulled up a little way down the track from Edgar’s cottage. The cottage itself was small, tucked away in woodland, and he was able to leave his truck away from the road. There were no cars in the driveway, no guests. Classical music blasted through the kitchen windows: opera, a man’s thick baritone, infinitely sad. Henri stood for a moment looking up at the sky, a few stars showing through gaps in the clouds. Then he shook his head and walked to the door and knocked.

Edgar smiled when he opened the door, his eyes only half open, lazy, seductive.

‘I’ve been wondering when you’d come,’ he said. He reached out for Henri’s waist; Henri tensed his abdominals under Edgar’s touch. They kissed. ‘Are you going to sit and keep me company for a while, or is this one of your hit and runs?’ he said into Henri’s ear. Henri groaned, pushing Edgar into the house. He felt sick, and aroused, and relieved.

He lay on the sofa while Edgar sat next to his head, running a hand through Henri’s hair. He remembered washing Vanille’s blood from it just a few hours earlier, how sticky it had been.

‘How’s farm life?’ Edgar asked.

‘Fine,’ said Henri. He didn’t want to talk. ‘How’s writing life?’

‘Wonderful. I’m eighty pages in and it’s flying along. But now you’ve shown up I’m naturally bound to get lovesick and stop being able to write anything but sonnets. And the world has enough of those.’

Henri turned his head sharply to remove Edgar’s hand. ‘Can you get me a drink?’

‘All the vices are coming out tonight,’ he said in the smiling voice Henri couldn’t stand. Edgar walked to the kitchen and Henri sat up, flattening his hair down, stroking it firmly into its usual parting. He stared at the coffee table in front of him, covered in books and used cups and glasses. He picked up the book at the top of the pile: Literary Impressionism in Conrad and Ford. He flicked through the pages, but could no longer make much sense of the bald, un-accented striations of English on each page. Nor could he remember what Conrad had written, whether he was English or American. His knowledge had receded like Edgar’s hairline, eroded under the great seasonal tide of the farming year.

But it was books that had first got them talking, ten or eleven or twelve years ago now, at drinks after a christening ceremony in the village. It was shortly after Edgar had moved there, and for the first hour or so Henri avoided this stranger everyone referred to as an ‘eccentric’. ‘Pretentious ass,’ he whispered to Brigitte when they were first introduced. But then over drinks they began talking, Edgar telling him offhand, as if Henri wouldn’t know the first thing about it, that he was attempting a biography of Molière. He had been visibly surprised when Henri reeled off lines of Le Malade imaginaire. They went on to discuss Racine, who’d been Henri’s favourite at school, and it was enlivening to summon his past knowledge, talk to someone who shared it, let their talk meander down unpractised routes. With everyone else, each conversation was simply a replay of the last.

As the afternoon went on – a violently hot afternoon in mid-August, just before a mistral came and swept summer’s intensity away – he felt Edgar’s eyes on him, interested and appraising, and felt himself stand taller, hold his jaw more firmly. He left the party reluctantly, to Brigitte’s bemusement, since he was usually the one to drag them away from social events. And he drove home drunk, tingling throughout his body, excited and fearful and alive.

Now he was sitting before a stack of books on modernist theory, the Molière project abandoned many years since. Edgar placed a bottle of Chablis and two empty glasses on the table.

‘Actually, I should go,’ he said, standing quickly to stop Edgar trying to hold him back.

‘Would it have been different if I’d brought a Sauvignon?’ Edgar asked with a smile, and Henri ignored him. In a drier tone he said, ‘And with that, Hurricane Henri sweeps off to other shores, oblivious to the wreckage he leaves in his wake.’

‘I left the dog in the car,’ he lied, and let Edgar kiss him. Then he left, walking as quickly as possible to the truck.

When he got back to the farm, the house was unlit except for the kitchen. He walked in and saw his uneaten dinner on the side, covered neatly in cling film, with a little note beside it in Brigitte’s young-looking hand: ‘Enjoy yourself!’ He closed his eyes, bowed his head as he leant against the counter. He imagined her writing it, cleaning everything away, thinking before choosing those words. Then walking heavily up to their bed, folding her clothes, moving her large, soft body around their room. Falling asleep alone while her husband ejaculated in someone’s mouth. A man’s mouth.

He couldn’t eat, but he scraped the food into a plastic bag and tucked it towards the bottom of the bin, underneath the rest of the rubbish. Then he walked upstairs slowly, wearily, and crept into the room and lay down beside Brigitte. She wasn’t snoring, had clearly not been asleep.

‘Is everything all right? What time is it?’

‘It’s midnight,’ he said. ‘Everything’s fine, my darling. You can go to sleep.’

‘Did you eat your lamb?’

‘It was delicious,’ he said, as quietly and gently as if talking to a tired child.

She didn’t reach out for him; she never did. After their first abortive attempts at love-making, when they first married – he twisted his face at the memory of her great pink thighs straddling his hips, the fumbling of her hand around his retracted penis – she had barely grumbled or complained about the largely sexless partnership they maintained. There was the odd time, still, perhaps two or three times a year: in the total dark of night, thankfully free from foreplay or words, when he was driven by privation to indiscriminate urgency. But physical intimacy beyond the most purely anatomical was something she had had to learn to do without.

He wanted to turn to her now, stroke her hair or say something kind, but he felt too deadened, too heavy even to reach out his hand. He lay on his back, apart from her, staring into the darkness.

Marguerite turned her bedside lamp on and sat up in bed, blinking. She hugged her knees to her chest and listened. There was a toad’s high rattle like a burglar alarm outside her window; it reminded her of summer childhoods by lakes, where she and Cassandre had been wimps in the face of all the insects and creatures, however hard they’d pretended to be intrepid.

She rested her left cheek on her knees, studying her little room. The broken chair, the empty suitcase under the wardrobe. The tired rug stretched out on the floor.

She had switched the light on to try to escape a constant showreel of memories and images playing in her mind’s eye as she lay trying to sleep – as if the light might force them to scatter, like launching a floodlight on a pack of thieves. But the position she was sitting in now – knees to chest, face on knees, ears pricked, bedside lamp on – was too familiar for forgetting. She had sat exactly like this so many times that it almost felt as familiar to her as sleep.

She closed her eyes, the light glowing pink through her eyelids, and let herself slide back into one of the nights before everything changed. She pictured herself from the outside: a fourteen-year-old sitting up in the pristinely elegant cream bedroom her mother had designed for her. The wallpaper was feathered with very slightly raised, pale green swirls. She wasn’t allowed to pin or tack things onto the wall so she tried to rebel by covering the bedside table with neon-framed photographs of her and her friends on school trips or at birthday parties. Hiding cigarettes behind their backs, so that the innocuous photos held a secret challenge. She used to hang dream-catchers and strings of gaudy beads from the polished bedposts; aged ten, Cassandre had already started to imitate this but she couldn’t quite get it right. With plastic pony charms and hearts, her arrangements looked too young. If only Marguerite had just given her some of her own.

The night their mother first left them was one of those nights: Marguerite was sitting up listening to her parents arguing. She was used to it by then; she spoke to her best friend Adeline about it sometimes in quiet corners at school, drawing her face in and making it sound much more dramatic than it was. ‘I worry for their lives, sometimes,’ she’d say, but that was dazzlingly untrue: her father would never have raised a hand against her mother, nor her mother – tiny and skinny, her meticulously sculpted arms weak – against him. Indeed, their lack of physical contact seemed to constitute a great part of the complaints they routinely filed against each other during the day. At night, on the other hand, specific words were hard to make out through the muffler of the bedroom walls; theirs was an amorphous volley of snarling, parodying, occasional bellowing. It was a tidal swell of rage, it came and went through the night, and Marguerite stayed up to listen, mostly for Cassandre’s sake. Four years younger, she was not yet sophisticated enough to hear the fights without fear and distress.

Inevitably the door handle would swivel slowly and Cassandre would appear with her little helmet of dark hair ruffled from sleep. She’d stand in the doorway until Marguerite beckoned her in. She had a beautiful face before everything changed; surely it was not just through the prism of an older sister’s pride that Marguerite thought that. It was tidy and pointed and neat, her skin a bit darker than Marguerite’s, her lips a very perfect bow.

She’d get under the covers at the foot of Marguerite’s bed and ask her to sing. Until recently, Marguerite had always sung when Cassandre asked. Usually it was a little ditty she had invented, chronicling the adventures of two unlikely friends: a chimp, blundering yet grandiose, and a nightingale. She improvised the words each time, inventing a new adventure for the pair. Cassandre would join in when the chorus came.

But Cassandre hadn’t yet left école primaire, whereas Marguerite was already coming to the end of collège, starting soon at the lycée; she had kissed two boys, she’d smoked cigarettes and tried vodka, she had recently got her period and bought a white bra that she filled carefully with folded tissue. Things were different; she would still defend Cassandre to the death but she no longer sang willingly whenever asked. As a result, Cass had taken to begging, which annoyed Marguerite.

‘The Chimp and the Nightingale, Margo?’ she asked.

‘Not tonight, Cass.’ But because she looked sad, Marguerite added: ‘I’ll sing to you tomorrow. I’ve just had a really long day: double maths in the morning and double Latin in the afternoon, and I have to get up early to finish extra homework from Madame Garcia because she’s a complete bitch.’

‘Poor you,’ said Cassandre. ‘That sounds so stressful.’ She had learnt the word ‘stressful’ from Marguerite, and used it constantly.

‘It is. And Monsieur Clerc’s an imbecile, and the boys in my class are even bigger imbeciles.’ She sighed dramatically. ‘Enjoy primaire while you can.’ Cassandre nodded, wriggling down further under the covers. ‘How’s your homework, Cass? Are you revising hard enough?’

‘I think so.’

‘You’re a little brainbox.’

‘Hmm, I don’t know.’

‘Well, I do. You’re a brilliant little geek. I bet you get the highest marks in your year.’

The toad started rattling again and Marguerite opened her eyes, back in Jérôme’s quiet house. She sat completely still, treasuring the memory but also aware that she was inventing the conversation. She always did this: she let her younger self become her ideal of Cassandre’s older sister. Always guiding, always supportive. Would she really have been so kind that night? She remembered the slamming of doors, her father coming into the room to declare that their mother had left them all. It was the first time she’d done this, and they didn’t know better than to doubt its permanence. She remembered Cassandre crying and her father’s willowy frame disappearing back into the darkness; she remembered holding her little sister and drying her tears, eventually getting her to sleep. But she couldn’t remember whether she’d sung.

‘Please say I sang, please say I sang.’ She closed her eyes and shook her head to banish the thoughts and images. She lay back down, leaving the lamp on, hoping that Jérôme would call her down to tend to him. ‘Please say I sang.’

5

Jérôme was sick all morning. He refused, over and over, to sit up to vomit, and dragged his weight down in her arms when she tried to force him to. She had to give up, pulling him instead to the very side of the mattress so he could retch sideways into the bin. He hadn’t eaten much the night before and there was next to nothing for him to bring up. A senseless, repetitive heaving went on throughout the morning, punctuated by protracted groans like a woman in labour.

As the hours wore on she started to feel angry at the sheer relentlessness of his vomiting. She was rough with him when she pulled him repeatedly onto his side, and almost shouted when he disobeyed her instructions.

‘Do you want to choke on your own vomit? Do you think that would be enjoyable?’

He in turn was obstructive and difficult, but she caught a look sometimes in his eyes that was fearful. In regret, she would lower her voice and cool his forehead, but then the heaving and the refusal to get into the right position would start again and her frustration would flare.

Finally the gaps between retching were longer than twenty minutes, but she still didn’t dare leave his room. She let him lie back and close his eyes, and then she sat at the bedroom table, exhausted. She needed to eat, but she couldn’t face getting up. She couldn’t even face cleaning the bin out; it sat by the side of the bed and the room stank. Jérôme started to snore, a faint and reedy sound.

She was startled by a loud knock coming from the kitchen; so too was Jérôme, who snorted and opened his eyes, glassy and distant, before falling back to sleep. She picked up the bin, taking it from the room as she walked through the house to the kitchen.

‘Shit,’ she said under her breath as she saw Suki’s face peering through the glass of the kitchen door. She tried to smile as she opened the door but it couldn’t have been convincing.

‘Is it a bad time?’ Suki asked.

‘Well, quite, yes,’ she said, letting her come in. ‘Hold on a moment.’

She turned, taking the bin out into the utility room. She took her time to rinse it out with hot water and bleach. You don’t just turn up, unannounced, on someone’s job, she thought. When she had finished rinsing it out, she took it back into Jérôme’s room, setting it down by the bed. Then she turned him, finally malleable with sleep, onto his side. His mouth gaped.

She smelt Suki’s smoke before she came back into the kitchen.

‘Can you take that outside?’ she said. It came out harshly, rudely. ‘It floats through the house,’ she said, more softly.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Suki. She opened the kitchen door and stood there, gazing at Marguerite. Half in shade and half in sunlight, she looked more beautiful than Marguerite had realised she could. ‘I think I’ve come at a bad time and you’re cross.’

‘I’m sorry to seem that way. I’m just very busy. Jérôme’s not well.’

‘Of course.’ She reached down to open the little violet bag that hung by her hip, and took out a folded piece of paper. She handed it over. ‘Have a look,’ she said.

Marguerite unfolded it: it was a flyer for a spring fête in the village. There were bad illustrations of lambs and ducklings with big eyes and long eyelashes.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Suki said. ‘Why is Suki giving me an invitation to a ghastly spring fête, I can’t think of anything worse. Right?’

‘Well, not ghastly.’

‘Marguerite!’ Suki let her head fall back to look at the sky. ‘Don’t be so polite! I know perfectly well you would have no interest in a village fête.’

She looked at her, raising an eyebrow in a way that seemed rehearsed, imitated perhaps from someone onscreen.

‘Okay, it doesn’t exactly sound like my kind of thing,’ she said.

Suki watched her for a moment. ‘I know I’m sort of foisting myself on you,’ she said, ‘and you have absolutely no wish for my company.’

Marguerite started to protest but she raised her hands to stop her.

‘Stop, don’t say anything. But I’m going to keep trying, because I don’t think it’s right that you’re out here in the middle of nowhere with absolutely no company whatsoever. Apart from Lanvier.’ She rolled her eyes and took a last, concentrated drag on her cigarette, little lines appearing around her lips as she sucked. She dropped the butt onto the ground beside her and stamped it out, leaning against the doorframe. ‘The reason I’m here is because I need your help.’

‘Aha,’ said Marguerite. She stood. ‘Coffee?’

‘Badly needed, yes please.’

She took the kettle to the sink, closing her eyes as she let the water run. She heard cupboards open and close; when she turned, Suki was busying herself shaking coffee into a large, beaten-up cafetière Marguerite had never used.

‘I have an instinct for where things are kept,’ she said, smiling. ‘That had to be a cups and cafetière cupboard. Just as I bet you keep saucepans in that one, down there. Am I right?’

‘Yes.’

‘You see? It’s like I have an instinct for good housekeeping but no knowledge of how to implement it. You’ve seen my place, it’s a total bombsite.’

‘It’s a great location.’

‘Yes and no. I love being able to spy on everyone. And I can avoid them all, I simply wait for the coast to be clear before I walk out the door. But on the other hand, I’m stuck right in the thick of it. I get so claustrophobic there. Sometimes I picture a huge hand coming down and tearing the house from its foundations and carrying it thousands of miles away.’

‘Where would it take the house?’ asked Marguerite. ‘The giant hand.’

‘Iran. The mountains. Lorestan province.’ The kettle clicked and steam rose; Marguerite made to pick it up but Suki reached out to stop her. ‘You mustn’t pour it when it’s still boiling. It should be about 85 degrees. I’ll do it.’

Marguerite stood back as Suki removed the kettle lid and together they watched the steam escape and thin. Suki took it from its perch, lifted it high above the cafetière.

‘You should also pour it onto the coffee from a height,’ she said. She poured, let it rest, stirred it carefully with a knife lying in the sink. ‘Now we leave it again before we plunge.’

She walked over to the door again and stood there to light her second cigarette. ‘What about you?’

‘Me?’

‘The hand. Where would it take you?’

Marguerite shrugged. She tried hard to think of somewhere, anywhere. ‘I don’t really know.’

‘Surely Paris?’

‘God, no.’ Suki’s eyes focused more intently on her face and she regretted the strength of her reaction. ‘Too hectic,’ she said, to explain herself. She lifted the cafetière and placed it down on the table. ‘Am I allowed to plunge it yet?’

Suki gestured with one hand as she blew out a jet of smoke. ‘You are allowed,’ she said, smiling. ‘Slowly, though. What was I saying before? My house. Yes, it’s lovely. But I hate that fucking place.’

Something about the immediacy of the comment made Marguerite laugh. Suki seemed surprised, and laughed too.

‘It’s all twee little houses and paper-doily curtains and the same small-minded little people wandering around talking about how big their aubergines grew last harvest.’ She took a long drag. ‘I’m not even exaggerating. That’s the kind of thing they talk about.’

‘But there must be some normal people,’ said Marguerite.

‘No, the point is that they are normal. Too normal. Paralysingly normal. There are some good ones – little Luc, the librarian. A very smart guy. We have quite a famous writer living in the woods, Edgar DuChamp.’ She looked at Marguerite expectantly, but she shook her head; she’d never heard of him. ‘And there’s Madame Brun, a barmy old woman – three metres tall or something – who only wears black. Have you seen her?’

Again, Marguerite shook her head. ‘What about your husband?’

‘Philippe?’ Suki forced a laugh. ‘He’s worse than the rest.’ She stared into the distance for a moment, scratching her neck with one of her long painted nails, and for a moment Marguerite was reminded of a bird of prey. ‘I’m just kidding, he’s not that bad. But I get so bored, Marguerite.’

The use of her name jarred, suggestive of an unearned intimacy. As if she sensed it too, Suki threw her unfinished cigarette away and came back to sit at the table.

‘I haven’t even explained why I’m here,’ she said. ‘So this fête. Hear me out – it’s actually not as bad as you’d think. It happens every May, and it’s just the village selling various things and showing off their produce or their latest haircut. And everyone brings their ugly little dogs that look like rats and they dress them up in ugly little outfits.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve made it sound dire, haven’t I?’ Again she laughed, and it occurred to Marguerite for the first time that she might be nervous. ‘But anyway, so I’m bored and what the hell, I’ve signed up to do a stall.’

‘What kind of stall?’

There had been a small change in Suki’s expression, a flicker of something in her smile. Marguerite noticed a faint blush rising up over her cheeks.

‘Last year I ran a fancy-dress stall for the kids. I piled up all the amazing scarves and headpieces and costume jewellery I have – I love collecting these things – and bunged them on the stall and invited all the children to dress up in them.’

‘That sounds like a great idea.’

‘Well, yes, I thought so too. But the problem is absolutely no one let their kids come and use the clothes. I actually heard one woman tell her nephew not to touch anything from “the mystic’s little box of tricks”.’

‘The mystic?’

‘They call me the mystic. I think they think I’m some kind of witch doctor or something.’

‘Why?’

Suki shrugged. ‘My hijab? It makes me want to shake them. I want to say, there are no witch doctors, there’s no voodoo in Iran. We’re more civilised than the lot of you.’ She looked quickly at Marguerite, watching for offence, and affected a more relaxed expression. ‘Maybe they just confuse “Suki” with “Sufi”. Though actually they’re too ignorant to know what Sufism is.’

‘It sounds ridiculous either way.’

‘Yes, it is. Ridiculous. And I felt ridiculous standing behind a stall dressed in my most beautiful clothes with the entire contents of my wardrobe displayed in front of me and not a single child even allowed to come near. And they wanted to, you know? I could see it, especially the little girls. They were itching to try on all the pretty things.’ She got up and lit yet another cigarette by the door. ‘So I’m not making that mistake again this year. This year, I’m running a simple bric-a-brac stall. You’ve seen my house, you’ve seen all my things. Well I have piles more hidden away in my attic and Philippe’s been at me for years to clear it out, so I thought, right, let’s see if they’ll stay away from my stall this time. Greedy little shits.’