Marguerite, page 30
‘I’m sorry.’
‘But there are two things. One, and this is the really strange one, I can’t seem to care too much.’ He barked a little sharp, whispered laugh, a fake laugh. ‘If it were any other chap, my God would I be furious. But as you know, I really am fond of that boy. Even if he’s a damn fool to have done what he’s done. Irresponsible, unspeakably stupid. Disrespectful to me, irresponsible with you. If he cared one jot about you, as I’m sure he claims to, he wouldn’t have let this happen.’
He waited again, the horrible silence coming back in to fill the space between them.
‘And the second thing,’ he said finally. ‘Luckily for you, I don’t actually want you sent away. Even though God knows you deserve to be sent scuttling off to some desperate little life elsewhere, I don’t necessarily want that.’ He sniffed. ‘I don’t want a new nurse, not now, I need someone who knows me. And you owe it to me, I think, to stay with me until the end now.’
‘I want to stay here,’ she said.
‘I’m sure you do.’ His tone was a jeer.
‘For you,’ she said. ‘For the job. Not for anything else.’
‘Hmm.’
‘I – want to stay here, as your nurse. I would be very upset not to be able to care for you.’
‘Well, don’t be a bore,’ he said. ‘Don’t overdo it.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘One condition then.’
‘Of course.’
‘Actually, two. One, you’ve got to be less of an idiot. Stop courting disaster and make sure my sons don’t find out about any of this. God knows what his wife thinks. And more importantly, don’t you dare drop your attention for one moment. You’re here for me, not for Monsieur Brochon. I’m your patient, I’m your employer, I’m the one you’re here for. Don’t you let your care for me suffer one single drop because of him.’
‘I won’t,’ she said, ‘I would never, I promise, you’re my entire focus.’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘But words are easy. Just don’t for one moment forget why you’re here.’
‘I promise.’
He sighed, deeply, shifted his head a little on the pillow. ‘The stupidity, though,’ he said. ‘That’s what I really can’t believe. You, fine, but Henri . . . How could he be so unspeakably stupid?’
She closed her eyes; she wanted to beg him not to say that. But he was right. Henri had been acting like a child, she thought, and the pain of that thought was searing. She couldn’t bear to feel pity for him, to think less of him. She wanted to see him as the calm and handsome and intimidating man he’d been to her.
But they had been like two children, she thought, like children in Neverland, in some ridiculous made-up world. She of all people knew that world didn’t exist; she’d known it all along.
* * *
• • •
There wasn’t a single star. He stood in the door from the kitchen, trawling the garden from side to side with the beam of the torch. Someone had just been here.
When they had sat outside for dinner, the turquoise of dusk had been mingled with clouds; now they squatted, a dark lid over the house, as far as he could see. The black bin in which he’d been collecting up weeds and detritus from the garden was lying on its side, sickly, spewing shrivelled leaves. A scarf of Marguerite’s lay like oil on the ground; the chairs on which they’d sat to eat had been knocked forward like supplicants, genuflecting, heads locked together. He closed the door behind him, letting it click quietly. Still looking out at the garden, sweeping the torchlight back and forth, he turned the key in the lock and then crouched to slip the key beneath his bare foot in its boot. Moving the torch into the crook of his elbow, he used both hands to tie the laces tight. He would need them tight if he had to run.
Then he stood up and stepped out into the garden, turned onto the driveway, sought out its corners with the light. He thought of the lighthouse in a book he’d read as a child, how eerie a symbol of homecoming it had always seemed to be. And how lonely a home, that one sweeping light amidst acres of stormy ghastly black.
Surely whoever had just been here had left, he thought as he stepped forward, gravel crunching and popping underfoot. People don’t wait in the shadows with a gun, not in real life. But still he felt watched. He moved so that his back was to the house but he didn’t feel protected, there was still the bottom-right corner of the driveway, behind his right shoulder, where he knew the intruder had recently been, had recently pushed over the bin, the chairs, held the scarf that had touched Marguerite’s skin. He swept it quickly with light and then moved the torch back to the driveway in front of him, the little green car of Marguerite’s, his own silent truck.
He approached his truck first. He hadn’t locked the doors, he never did. He swung the torch quickly down onto the seats, the spaces at the foot of the seats, the boot he had always taken pride in keeping so ordered and tidy. Its empty space blinked back at him, and he moved past it with a small exhalation, looked in the tiny spaces of Marguerite’s car, found emptiness there too.
And then he moved further forward, and the torch caught something dark and straight lying in the space between those once-grand gates, opening out onto the empty road beyond. He moved closer and saw that it was one of his own shotguns: dark, diesel-coloured metal shining now in the torchlight, laid out like a gift for him against the gravel. He ducked forward to grab it, eyes and torch on the road ahead.
He opened it up, eyes darting between the gun and the road. It had been fired, and now it was reloaded. The skin prickled around his neck, something curling around his ears. Who could have done this, have crept in here and fired a gun and reloaded it and left it here like an invitation. He knew who it had to be, and yet he couldn’t recognise anything he knew, not even the remotest trace, in the lunacy and abhorrence of the act. He advanced slowly, steadily, running the torch into the tracts of forest either side of the road, and he thought he could smell an engine on the air. But the night was silent, and he turned his back to the road and forest and strode back to the house, refusing to run and refusing to turn back, refusing to show his fear.
He righted the chairs and bin swiftly, grabbed the scarf, unlocked the door as quietly as he’d locked it. Then he stepped into the kitchen where the refrigerator was humming, rattling very slightly, an inane sound, and he shut the door behind him and locked it and leant for a moment against the table, breathing in, breathing out. He crouched down, took off his boots and crept through the house, past the utility room and Jérôme’s room and the bottom of the staircase, round to the forbidden rooms they’d explored furtively as children, the study and dressing room and the grand, large ground-floor bedroom where Jérôme and Céline had slept. In the torchlight, he looked for a place to hide the gun.
* * *
• • •
‘We need to leave here,’ he told her when he woke her. She fixed the one dark eye not hidden by the pillow onto his, and he saw her pupil contract, noticed the naked pink flesh of her caruncle.
She blinked. ‘What?’
Then she turned, both eyes closed again as if she were in pain, the back of her head on the pillow. The half-light washed over her face.
‘We need to leave.’ He’d been waiting to say it for what felt now like hours, lying there filled with fear and resolution and rage towards Brigitte as Marguerite dozed beside him, marvelling at how she could sleep at all. When he’d come in, crept through the dark to hide the gun, every muscle in his body still alive with adrenaline, she hadn’t even asked him what the noise had been. She had just held him when he’d told her there was nothing out there, and then she’d slept. ‘We need to go.’
A frown passed over her forehead, and she opened her eyes, stared up at the ceiling. Then she sat up and turned to look down at him, very sadly. ‘We can’t go.’
He felt acutely embarrassed then, he realised, under her gaze. He sat up too, stared across the room and out of the great wide windows, to the dark cypress just ahead. But he wasn’t exaggerating things. Brigitte had come to the house and fired a gun, laid it down fully loaded in the gateway. An oblique, violent warning of bad intent, of the violence she could do them.
‘It was Brigitte who came last night,’ he said. When he turned to look at her again, he saw just how tired she was. Her face was grey and drawn, its bones sloping down from dark rings under her eyes. ‘She disturbed things in the garden. Knocked chairs over, messed things up.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘Because—’ He saw her think for a moment, and then she closed her eyes, shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s not your fault. But she’s worked out that I’m here, obviously. She’ll come again.’
She nodded, and he was amazed for a moment by her equanimity, but then he saw that without the gun it didn’t sound as urgent as it was.
‘She had a gun on her,’ he said, and her eyes widened.
‘What?’
‘It was a gunshot we heard.’
‘You said it was nothing.’
‘I didn’t want you to worry.’
She shook her head, dumbly. ‘Where was she? Did you find her?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘But I found the gun.’
‘Has she gone mad?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have thought so, but yes, it seems completely insane to have done this. And she’ll come again.’
‘She can’t.’ Her voice was firm, even strict.
‘She will if I stay.’
‘So you can’t stay,’ she said, and he was chilled by the blankness in her voice.
‘I want us to leave here together,’ he said, and he heard that his voice wasn’t firm, that it didn’t sound how he wanted it to. She closed her eyes, shook her head slowly, and when she opened them she didn’t look at him but stared ahead.
‘I can’t leave Jérôme,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
‘I won’t leave him.’
‘He’ll find another nurse.’
‘I won’t let him down. I promised him I’d stay here until he died.’
‘But he’ll be fine with someone else.’
‘No,’ she said, he saw that there was anger there. ‘I’m going to nurse him until the end. I promised.’
He leant back against the wall, then, and for the first time he envisaged the only other real option available to him: leaving Rossignol on his own, taking his things, driving back to the farm, to a crazed Brigitte he no longer knew. He didn’t see how that would be possible, how he could possibly leave what he had here. And Marguerite – she would resume that life she’d had before all this. She’d wander around this great empty house, lonely and sad, in servitude to the worthless old man in his bed, this tyrant who wouldn’t let her go.
She sat back then too, laid her hand on his, and the look in her eyes was kinder. ‘He knows about us,’ she said. ‘He told me last night.’
‘Shit.’
‘I know.’ She twisted her lips, and they were very pale, very dry. ‘But he’s sort of okay about it. I mean, he’s not, but it’s all relatively okay. I promised I would stay here and be with him until the end.’
‘But—’ He had to look away from her to be able to say it; he felt as if he were shouting across a great gulf, so different from when he’d said it in the car just two days ago, and again, last night, after they’d made love, before they’d drifted into sleep in each other’s arms and then the gunshot had woken them. ‘I love you. I’m in love with you.’
‘So am I.’
‘So—’ And he wanted to say, so how can this old man be more important than that? and as he searched for the words she stopped him, resting a cool hand on his face to turn him towards her.
‘I’m not going to leave Jérôme. I need to be there with him until the end, I would never forgive myself if I wasn’t.’ Then she closed her eyes and kissed him, twice.
‘And then what?’ he asked when her face pulled away. ‘After he dies.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then we must be together.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Why maybe?’
‘What about your wife?’ she asked.
‘This is more important than her.’
‘Where would we go?’
‘Anywhere.’
She sighed again, rubbed her hands over her eyes, and he wanted to shake her shoulders, wake her up, make her engage with what was happening.
‘I need to sleep, Henri,’ she said, and her voice had a keening edge to it, as if she were begging.
‘Okay.’ She stared at him, waiting for more, and he nodded. ‘Okay.’ He smiled, touched her face. ‘It’s okay. You need sleep.’
She let her head slide down the wall to rest again on the pillow. He leant down to kiss her, and as he did so he was aware of a quite dazzling pain at the very pit of his chest, at his sternum, as if something had been lodged there. He felt as if all he could do with the pain was lie down, panting, knocked flat by the extremity of it. But he rose and dressed, quietly, and he didn’t turn back to look at her when he left the room.
* * *
• • •
Jérôme was precious and tricky all morning. He kept her in the room with him, didn’t want to finish the bread and butter he’d asked for, tried a pear, didn’t like it and asked for a peach. He snarled when she said they were out of peaches – ‘All eaten up by a visitor, no doubt’ – and as she read to him, he frowned frequently so that she found she stumbled over certain words, mixing up prepositions and missing out connectors.
‘It feels old and filthy in here,’ he said when she put the book aside, making to leave. ‘Give it a clean.’
The room was as clean as it always was, but she saw that he would do all he could to keep her there, and that she would have to do his bidding. She opened the windows wide, scrubbed the sink and mopped the floor under the bed. He had the radio on, and its droning commentary drifted in and out of her mind as she worked – odd phrases about something that was happening in China and something else in Poland, analysis of a recent football game between Lyon and Troyes – but she couldn’t hold on to them, found her mind instead moving between some banal and senseless memory from school or nursing college, and then the incomprehensible, preposterous image of Brigitte standing wild-eyed in the dark with a gun.
By the time she had cleaned everything she could, his eyelids were drooping but she saw him try to fight to sit upright, look awake. She gave him a few pills and he didn’t swallow properly and choked, vomiting a jet of garish pink froth onto his chest and the sheets in front of him.
‘Blood!’ he exclaimed.
‘It’s the coating of the pill,’ she said, and with a great roll of exhaustion she left the room to get pyjamas and clean sheets, came back and went through the long palaver of changing them around his immobile body.
‘I’ll have lunch soon,’ he said when she was finished, and she nodded.
‘You didn’t eat much breakfast.’
‘Quite.’
‘Will you sleep first?’
‘Barely. Bring me lunch very soon, I’ll just close my eyes for a quick moment. Half an hour, no more. Then I think you should stay in here for the afternoon, read your book or something.’
She nodded again and took the sheets up in a great bundle in her arms out of the room and into the utility room. She dropped them onto the floor and then she leant back in the cool dark of the room and closed her eyes. All she wanted in the world was a day of total silence.
* * *
• • •
Henri was standing in the kitchen when she came in. He had his back to her, staring out of the window above the sink. He didn’t turn, and she looked at the breadth of his back and felt frightened by the strangeness of him, by how little she knew about him. She shook the kettle to check its weight for water but it was empty and she didn’t want to disturb him by filling it at the sink. She closed the door, shutting out the rest of the house, and finally he turned but he looked at her only for a moment.
‘Do you want me to leave?’ he asked eventually, his back to her once again.
She sat down. ‘Of course not. But you have to.’
‘I know I have to. But I’m asking whether you want it. Whether it’ll be a relief to you.’
‘No, it won’t be a relief to me, Henri.’
She looked at the back of his neck above his collar, brown against blue cotton. She imagined standing and crossing the room, reaching up on her toes to kiss the skin there, and it felt like an impossibility.
‘She destroyed the garden,’ he said. She looked outside, unsure what he meant, and then stood and went out, walking over to see the little herb garden he’d shown her so proudly the night before.
The herbs had been flattened, others tugged from the earth so that great clots with little stones littered the mess of green. She knelt down and rested her face in her hands on the earth, like a child, like she was praying. The smell of soil and basil and rosemary and mint rose up to meet her face as she held it in the dark space of her hands, her elbows sinking into the damp softness. The tidy, beautiful little garden he had made for her, spent hours over the last few days planting with care, as if it was something she deserved. They would never grow another one, she thought. It was destroyed forever, and she thought of Cassandre, of her broken green eyes, her broken gaze.
