Nightingale

She was slouching a little as she spoke, staring intently at a point on the doorframe, sucking at her cigarette. The soft beauty Marguerite had caught earlier was gone; she looked sad, shrunken, hard.

‘I think it sounds like a good idea,’ Marguerite said, though she thought the opposite. If they wouldn’t let their children dress up in her clothes, why did Suki think they’d want her ornaments?

But Suki looked at her gratefully. ‘You think so? I think so too.’ She sighed. ‘Anyway, it’s probably stupid to bother getting involved, but I just can’t bear hiding away in my house pretending I don’t know they all hate me. I live in Saint-Sulpice too. I have a right to be there.’

‘Of course.’

‘So. I want you to come to the fête and I want you to pretend to buy a few of my things.’

Marguerite laughed; she had expected something more onerous.

‘I know it’s pathetic,’ Suki said, smiling ruefully. ‘Will you do it though? I have money here, for you to spend.’ She fiddled with her bag again, took some notes out. ‘Here’s fifty euros. You can even keep whatever you buy. I’m basically giving it to you.’

‘Okay. I can come, but not for long.’

‘That’s fine. But you’ll definitely come?’

Marguerite felt uncomfortable, constricted, as she always did when she was asked to make a commitment.

‘As long as Jérôme is okay.’

‘Great. Okay. You’ll be there.’ She came in to put the money on the table. ‘Well, I’m going to let you be now, but thank you. I won’t forget it.’

She leant forward to kiss Marguerite on each cheek. Above the smoke, she smelt of vanilla or coconut – something too sweet.

She didn’t wake Jérôme for lunch; she let him sleep, and he only called her to him mid-afternoon by knocking on his headboard, so faintly she barely heard it.

‘I feel much better,’ he said when she went in. But his face was still wax-coloured, and his lips, usually wide and strangely full for a man, were puckered and pale.

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

‘What are those?’ He pointed weakly at a small blue jug she’d placed on the table when he was asleep, holding a cluster of wild flowers she’d found in the garden. He looked at her with an expression she couldn’t decipher. It was wary, she thought, but not irritated; there was a softness in his face.

‘I found them in the olive groves, growing wild. Someone really needs to take over the garden; it could be so beautiful.’

‘It was,’ he said. ‘You’ve spent a while outside. You’re a little sunburnt.’

‘Surely I’m not,’ she said, touching her cheeks. ‘I wasn’t out there for long.’

‘Not burnt, a little tanned.’ He smiled, the very faintest of smiles.

She brought him bread and jam to eat, and sweet tea. The room smelt rancid from his morning of sickness, and she cleaned it as he ate.

‘I’m glad you’ve got an appetite,’ she said and he nodded, opening his mouth to take a bite. Some jam dripped off the bread and onto his chest, but he didn’t notice. There was a crumb fastened in the corner of his mouth. These things felt unbearably sad to her then; she came forward to wipe the jam away with a tissue, and he frowned.

‘You’re forever fussing.’

‘I’m going to change your sheets,’ she said when she’d taken his tray, and he nodded again. He leant into her arms as she lifted him up and they shuffled together towards the chair. It was odd, she realised, that she knew his smell more intimately than her own.

It was not until the next morning that Jérôme regained his usual strength: he had colour in his cheeks, sat upright in the bed. He was galvanised all the more by hunger; he snapped at her for food, refusing to let her clean his teeth first, and gobbled his toast loudly, flecks of spit collecting in the corners of his mouth.

‘I’d like chocolate,’ he said when he’d finished.

She smiled. ‘I don’t think we have any.’

‘Why not? Have you eaten it?’

‘We haven’t had any in the house for weeks. I didn’t know you particularly liked it.’

‘Well, don’t just presume,’ he said, his eyebrows screwed together to form a deep, fleshy crease between them. Marguerite noticed that a couple of the coarse white eyebrow hairs had grown long beyond the others, indeed beyond proportion; they strayed up towards his hairline, as if trying to replace the hair that had been lost there.

‘What are you looking at?’

‘Nothing.’ She filled his glass from the jug, gave it to him. ‘You must stay well hydrated today.’

But he pushed the glass away, and stared in front of him. ‘Get me something else to eat. And I don’t mean more bread, I’m sick to death of bread.’

As Marguerite walked through to the kitchen, she realised she was pleased by his bad temper, signifying as it did his return to relative health. She took raisin biscuits from a tin and arranged them on a plate to bring back to him, but when she re-entered his room and set the plate down on his bedside table he didn’t even register them.

‘I heard a voice here yesterday.’

‘When?’

‘You know when, come on. I’ve just remembered, I heard talking when I was drifting in and out of sleep. Yesterday. Come on, I’m not stupid.’

‘Of course not.’

‘Who was it? Was someone coming to see me?’

‘No,’ she said, and she saw something slacken in his face. A ripple passed over his forehead, around his eyes and mouth. His shoulders dropped. He stared down the bed for a moment, unfocused.

‘It was a woman from the village,’ she said, for the sake of saying something.

‘Name?’ he asked.

‘She’s called Suki.’

‘Suki Lacourse,’ he said immediately, his interest rekindled. ‘Arab, married to Philippe Lacourse. He’s a prime cretin. Why in God’s name was she here?’

‘Iranian. She just passed by.’

‘How do you know her?’

‘I’ve met her a few times in the village.’

‘So you’re socialising, are you? How nice for you.’

‘I’m not socialising.’

‘You could have fooled me.’

‘I spend every moment in an empty house with you.’

‘Henri Brochon was here last week. Suki Lacourse is dropping by on social visits. What next? I’m going to wake up to a party at the end of my bed.’

She couldn’t help smiling, then, because it was too ridiculous. He smiled too, unexpectedly; it was a wry smile, a little sheepish.

‘So you refuse to tell me why that woman was visiting the house. What could you possibly have to do with someone like that? She’s old enough to be your mother.’

‘She’s not even forty,’ she said. ‘And anyway, she had a favour to ask.’

He frowned. ‘I’d watch out for her, if I were you.’

‘Why?’

‘She’s trouble.’

‘Why do you think that?’

‘She’s – different.’

‘You mean foreign.’

He looked at her with irritation. ‘No. She makes trouble because she’s never adapted to her environment.’

‘Has her environment adapted to her?’

‘Of course not. Why should it?’

Marguerite shook her head. She didn’t have the energy.

‘You think I’m talking about her being a Muslim, but I’m not. I’m talking about her aspirations. She’s lived here, what, twenty years? But she hasn’t accepted anything. She doesn’t accept that she’s married to a boring man, living in a boring house in a boring village, and that ultimately, for all her exoticism, she’s pretty damn boring herself.’ He licked his lips and paused. ‘You may not think I know much, but I do know that people who don’t adjust their expectations cause trouble.’

Marguerite said nothing, and Jérôme smiled again. ‘You, for example,’ he said, his tone gentler, ‘have quashed all your expectations, all your aspirations, and therefore you’re no trouble at all.’

She saw, with some shock, that he wasn’t needling – that he didn’t expect this to offend her at all. But his words caused instant, tangible pain. She felt anger rising up inside her, a rush of it.

‘Thank you for your armchair analysis, but you know absolutely nothing about my life.’

‘I was joking with you, for God’s sake,’ he said.

‘And the only reason behind people thinking that Suki is “trouble” is bigotry.’ He tried to say something, but she interrupted. ‘Of course you don’t adapt to a place if you’re treated like an outsider from beginning to end, and you’re left out of things, whatever you do.’

She was inarticulate in her anger; he swiped the air calmly, dismissing her words. ‘Let me tell you, Marguerite,’ he said, ‘the delusion of centrality and the self-doubt involved in feeling left out translate into one’s behaviour, one’s words, even one’s body language. All of that renders a person sufficiently unattractive to company that they end up actually being left out. It’s circular, it fulfils itself.’

He looked up at the ceiling and licked his lips again, satisfied; she imagined clearly how he would have behaved as the boss of his company, how staggeringly arrogant he must have been before old age started to degrade him.

‘Thank you for the lecture,’ she said, instantly regretting those words. They played themselves back in her mind, immature and empty. He laughed to himself, reaching for a biscuit.

‘Silly girl. I found another weak spot.’

She left the room and walked straight through the kitchen, past the stupid little clusters of flowers she’d been arranging. She kicked the door open, swearing, and stopped outside, hot tears starting in her eyes.

She heard a sound, then, nearby, and sensed the men’s presence before she saw them. Henri Brochon and his farmhands, lugging the trunk of the ailing oak towards the driveway. So it was finally dead. They looked away, embarrassed for her, and she didn’t even try to acknowledge them or gather herself. She walked back into the kitchen with her head down and went straight upstairs to her bedroom, burying her face in the pillow until the humiliation receded, dream and reality becoming fused.

Brigitte had a special way of folding sheets and tablecloths. She’d invented it herself, when she was around fourteen. She didn’t like to teach it, in case someone might show someone else and pass it off as their own. That would annoy her, not because she wanted glory but because she couldn’t stand anything that wasn’t fair.

On the other hand, she had to admit she liked people to see her do it. It was very fast, very effective. She held the two corners at diagonals from each other, and through a series of wrist flicks the entire sheet ended up lying flat, in a diagonal half, on the table in front of her. It could then, with just two further folds, end up as a tidy square of fabric. Fold it once again and it would fit perfectly on a shelf: a slim, flat, unrumpled rectangle.

She felt Laure watching as she applied her method to sheet after white sheet. ‘Amazing how you do that,’ she said.

‘It’s a handy trick.’

She smoothed one, adding it to the tidy pile.

‘So how many double sheets have we got between us?’ asked Laure. ‘Fifteen?’

‘Fifteen white, and a further two or three if I throw in pink and blue too. We could use the coloured sheets for the flower-arranging stall?’

‘That’s an idea.’ Laure wrote down the figures in her book.

‘And an old one for face-painting, because it’ll get stained, however washable those paints claim to be.’ Laure nodded, and Brigitte kept folding.

‘I’m looking forward to the flower-arranging,’ said Laure. ‘I can’t wait to trample over Anne-Marie’s dismal collection again.’

‘Why does she even bother entering? You beat her every year. It’s embarrassing.’

Brigitte was the judge for the fête’s flower-arranging competition, so she didn’t enter – which was just as well, since she suspected she might outdo Laure’s arrangements. Laure’s were very pretty – lavish, abundant, scrupulously tidy – but Brigitte simply had a greater variety to work from. The farm gardens were filled with them.

‘Speaking of embarrassing,’ said Laure, rooting through her sewing basket to find pins for corsages, ‘Madame Lacourse is entering again. You know that, don’t you?’

Brigitte looked quickly at Laure, who didn’t look up, still looking for something in the basket. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I had no idea.’

‘I thought you knew,’ Laure said casually, taking a spool of blue ribbon from the basket and holding it against a band of blue elastic. ‘Not quite the right shade,’ she said quietly, frowning; then she looked up and blinked. ‘Are you bothered? She’ll make a fool of herself, like usual.’

‘Well, I just would have liked to know.’

‘Of course. I presumed you would know.’ She looked very serious, then. ‘Do you mean she didn’t apply to you?’

‘No, she didn’t.’

Now this was something; everyone in the village applied to Brigitte and Laure with their stall ideas – they had to do so by the end of February so that due planning could be done. And everyone knew to write to them both.

‘Oh. That’s odd – she applied to me pretty early. She was one of the first, actually. I presumed she would have written to you too.’

‘Apparently she doesn’t think I’m important enough.’

‘Oh you know it’s not that,’ said Laure. ‘She’s threatened by you, Brigitte, she always has been.’

‘Well,’ said Brigitte. She hadn’t folded the last sheet quite right; she felt distracted. She shook it out and started again. ‘What’s the stall, anyway?’

‘She hasn’t named it yet. As far as I can make out from the description, it’ll be a load of her shabby old knick-knacks from Timbuktu to God knows where.’

Brigitte was stuck. She needed Henri at the fête; she had asked him expressly to leave the farm in Paul’s hands that day, since she needed him to oversee her stalls while she judged the flower-arranging and artichokes, and to help set up in the morning. But still, though she trusted him, she didn’t like the thought of Suki’s stall attracting his attention, or the possibility that it might give them a chance to chat. At least fifteen years had passed since Suki’s obsession, but it still unsettled Brigitte. She hated the woman’s make-up, her painted nails and swaying walk. She hated her cigarettes, her air of sophistication. And while Henri had assured Brigitte that he didn’t find the woman attractive either, she remembered just once or twice witnessing his interest in what Suki had to say. She would ‘drop by’ when she knew his day would be winding up, and sit in their kitchen keeping his attention as he stood by the counter, drinking his beer. She could talk about poets and philosophers and films – things Henri found interesting that Brigitte could never find the time to care about. There was no one in the world but Suki who could get under Brigitte’s skin like that.

‘Don’t worry about it, Brigitte. I’m sure we can make her stall as successful as last year’s,’ Laure said, smiling. Brigitte laughed.

‘You’re awful,’ she said, but she felt relieved.

‘Poor girl,’ said Thierry.

‘Yes, poor girl,’ said his brother. ‘She looked like she was having a breakdown.’ He laughed, not unkindly.

‘I didn’t think Parisian girls swore like that. I should have covered your ears, Rémy. I don’t think you’ve even heard those words before.’

‘Shut up,’ Rémy said, grinning.

‘It was kind of hot actually. Boss?’ he asked, leaning forward between Rémy and Henri’s seats.

‘What?’

‘Is the old man really that bad?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean does he make everyone have a nervous breakdown?’

‘No,’ Henri said. ‘Don’t be stupid.’

‘It’s just, she looked pretty wound up.’

‘Be quiet,’ said Rémy, looking at Henri. ‘It’s not funny.’

‘Not funny at all, an attractive young woman all on her own, all wound up with no one to vent her frustration onto …’

Rémy laughed and Thierry continued, encouraged. ‘She must need a shoulder to cry on. Boss, do you have Monsieur Lanvier’s number? I could call to just, you know, check everything’s okay.’

‘I said don’t be stupid,’ said Henri, too crossly. Rémy’s smile dropped; Thierry fell silent. Henri sensed their confusion, but he didn’t care. The expression on her face had been one of torment, and Henri was reminded once again of a teenage Thibault, kicking gravel in the driveway at Rossignol, staring out of the gates, eyes glazed with a vision of some other life.

At home, he walked straight through the kitchen, barely acknowledging Brigitte and Laure as they greeted him. He walked through to his study and closed the door and sat down, staring at the wall. He’d been rude to the women, unreasonable with Thierry and Rémy. But it was intrusive, the boys joking about something even he was not qualified to understand. They didn’t know the Lanviers or the nurse, had no right to comment.

He leant back in his chair, closing his eyes. He was bored, and frustrated, and the inevitable prospect of masturbation depressed him. He must be the most prolific wanker in the whole of the Languedoc, he thought; literally, the biggest wanker. Handsome Henri, who could have had his pick of all the women, had chosen instead to spend a life of loyal devotion to his right hand. Granted, he cheated occasionally on this life partner, the odd furious fuck coming between them – but deviation only made their relationship stronger, less suffused as it was with sordidness and shame.

He opened his eyes, turned to see his face reflected in the glass of the painting beside him. He didn’t recognise his expression as his own: the grim half-smile, the tired eyes. He sighed and unfastened his trousers and let himself wank quickly, without enthusiasm. Then he cleaned himself carefully with a tissue, screwed it into a ball and threw it into the bin. Brigitte wouldn’t be best pleased when she emptied the bin out, but she could think what she liked. He’d given up caring.