Consolation (57 page)

The next four pages are a catalogue of little wooden houses
.

One morning, Charles suggested to Nedra, who spent long hours playing alone in the depths of a huge box shrub behind the henhouse, that he build her a real little house
.

The only answer she gave was a slow batting of her eyelashes
.

‘Rule number one: before you build a single thing you have to find a good location. So come with me, to tell me where you’d like it.’

She’d hesitated for a few seconds, looking around for Alice, then got up, smoothing her skirt
.

‘From the windows, would you rather see the rising sun or the setting sun?’

He felt bad to be putting her through such an ordeal, but he couldn’t manage it any other way, it was his profession
. . .

‘Rising sun?’

She nodded
.

‘Right you are. South, south-east would make the most sense.’

They went silently round the house in a big loop
. . .

‘This would be a good spot because you’ve got a few trees for shade and then the stream isn’t too far away . . . Very important to have water nearby!’

When she saw him in this light-hearted mood, she gradually brightened, and at one point, because they had to make their way through some brambles, she forgot herself and gave him her hand
.

The foundations were laid
.

After lunch, she brought him his coffee, as she had done ever since his first visit, and leaned against his shoulder while he drew the entire range of chalets offered by Balanda and Co
.

He understood her. Like her he believed that a picture was worth a thousand words and he drew innumerable variations for her. The size of
the
windows, the height of the door, the number of window boxes, the length of the terrace, the colour of the roof – and what should they carve in the middle of the shutters: lozenges or little hearts?

He could have guessed which model she would point to
. . .

Charles really had intended to leave, but now Mathilde was there, and Kate, between her nutcase of a mother and Mathilde, had given him a summit to aim for. All the more reason to stay and embark on this new childish undertaking
.

He’d covered a lot of ground with Marc, and he’d let him head off to his parents’ place with most of their files in the boot. Now, in order to find a new foothold, he had to keep his hands busy
.

And then . . . building miniature houses was something he’d always done particularly well, so far. If he scrounged around enough he would surely find a slab of marble in the barns somewhere . . . He thought he’d seen a broken mantelpiece somewhere the other day
. . .

At first Kate was annoyed when she found out that he was paying Sam and his mates, but Charles would not listen. Young apprentices deserved a salary
.

But the mates were more idle than venal and very soon let them down, so this gave Charles and Sam a chance to become better acquainted. And to appreciate each other. As is often the case when two blokes are sweating it out together digging ditches, tossing back beers, bellowing bloody hells, and comparing their blisters
.

On the third evening, as they were getting undressed on the pier, Charles asked Sam the same question he’d asked Mathilde
.

Charles understood his hesitation better than anyone. He found himself in exactly the same situation
.

There’s a photo slipped between the next two pages. He printed it out long after his return, and left it lying around on his desk for weeks before deciding to put it in the notebook
.

Inventory statement for end of project
.

Inventory statement full stop
.

It was Granny who took the photo, and it had been an epic event, trying to explain to her how to press the shutter without worrying about anything else. Poor Granny was not well versed in digital hybrids
. . .

They are all there. Standing just outside Nedra’s house. Kate, Charles, the children, the dogs, Captain Haddock and the entire barnyard
.

They’re all smiling, they’re all beautiful, they’re all hanging expectantly on the trembling of an old lady who is about to go into her classic clueless diva routine, but they all have faith
.

They’d known her for so long . . . Let their indulgence set her free
.

Alice was in charge of the décor (the day before she’d gone to fetch her books and had introduced him to the work of Jephan de Villiers . . . And that is what Charles appreciated most about these children, the way they always managed to lead him into unexplored territory . . . Whether it was Samuel’s principles of dressage, or Alice’s talent, or Harriet’s dark humour, or Yacine’s fifty anecdotes a minute . . . In all other respects they were totally typical: wearying, always wanting something, disrespectful, full of bad faith, noisy, unruly, bone idle, artful, and constantly squabbling with one another, but there was something about them that you didn’t find in other kids
. . .

A freedom of spirit, a tenderness, a quickness of mind (even courage, because one had only to see them take on all the chores that their huge house required, without ever making a sour face or complaining), a zest
for
life and a sense of ease with the world which Charles found endlessly fascinating
.

He remembered something Alexis’s wife had said about them: ‘Those little Mormons . . .’ but he did not agree with her at all. First of all, he’d seen them tear each other to pieces over the joysticks on the video games, spend entire afternoons in chat rooms or polishing up their blogs or selecting the best from YouTube (they’d forced Charles to sit through every single episode of ‘Have you ever seen’?) (which in fact he didn’t regret, he’d rarely laughed so heartily), but above all, he did not for one minute get the impression that they were entrenching themselves on the other side of their bridge
.

It was just the opposite . . . Everything that still throbbed with life came to them. To rub up against their joyfulness, their valour, their . . . nobility . . . Their farmyard, their dinners, their meadows, their mattresses – all were a stage for endless procession, and each day brought with it a crop of new faces
.

The latest receipt for their food supplies measured over one metre long (Charles was the one who’d been in charge that time . . . hence the aber-ration . . . he shopped, it would seem, like a Parisian on holiday), and at peak hours the beach nearly sank
.

What did they have that made them different from other children?

Kate
.

She was so unsure of herself – she had confided as much, said that every winter she succumbed to a depression that could last for days, where she was physically incapable of getting up in the morning; so the fact that she had been able to give so much confidence to these children – orphaned of both mother and father, as the official forms required one to specify – seemed to Charles nothing short of . . . miraculous
.

‘Come back in mid-December,’ she scoffed, to calm the zealous worshipper, ‘when it’s five degrees in the living room, and you have to break the ice on the hens’ water ever morning, and we eat porridge at every meal because I’ve got no strength left to cook anything else . . . And then Christmas comes . . . a wonderful family holiday with me all alone to stand in as the entire family tree, and then we’ll talk about miracles . . .’

(But another time, after a particularly depressing dinner during which our four professionals of the planet had drawn up an alarming balance sheet, with all the figures, irrefutable with . . . well . . . we know what . . . she had poured out her feelings: ‘This life . . . this very singular life – perhaps discriminating in some way – that I’ve imposed on the children
. . .
It’s
the only thing that might absolve me. In this day and age the world is in the hands of grocers, but tomorrow? I often tell myself that it’s only people who know how to tell a berry from a mushroom or how to plant a seed who will be saved . . .’

And then, elegant as ever, she had laughed and spouted a lot of nonsense in order to be forgiven for her lucidity . . .)

So Alice had taken charge of the décor, and Nedra had invited everyone to come and visit her palace
.

No, that’s not quite it. They were allowed to look, but not to go in. She had even stretched a rope in front of the door. The others were indignant, but she held her ground. This was her home. Her home on this earth that hadn’t wanted her and, with the exception of Nelson and his mistress, no one had right of asylum
.

You just have to have your documents in order
.

Charles and Sam had done things properly. The wolf could blow and blow, the bunker would hold. The stud partitions were supported by a cement screed, and the cladding nails were longer than Nedra’s palm
.

Besides, it’s visible on the photo – you can see she’s stressed out
.

When Granny finally allowed them to disperse, Kate turned to Nedra:

‘Tell me, Nedra, did you say thank you to Charles?’

The little girl nodded
.

‘I can’t hear what you said,’ insisted Kate, leaning lower
.

Nedra looked down at her feet
.

‘It’s all right,’ said Charles, embarrassed, ‘I heard her.’

For the first time he saw Kate get angry: ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, Nedra – two little syllables in exchange for all this work, that wouldn’t rip out your tongue now, would it?’

Nedra was biting her lips
.

The legal authority, who had become as white as her shirt, added before walking away: ‘You want my opinion? I don’t bloody care if I go into this selfish child’s house or not. I am disappointed. Terribly disappointed.’

She was wrong
.

The little word she had so hoped to hear was on the following page, and it would take a form that would leave them all speechless
.

The drawing isn’t one of Charles’s, it takes up two pages, and it isn’t really a drawing
.

It was Sam who copied out a rough draft of the required course, in order to memorize it
.

Squares, crosses, dotted lines and arrows in every direction
. . .

So here we are. The famous competition that had unseated him
.

Third weekend in the month of August. Charles had not yet had the courage to mention it to Mathilde, but their days were numbered. His voicemail was saturated with threats, and Barbara, crafty woman, had managed to find Kate’s number. Everyone was expecting him, there were already a dozen or more appointments set up, and already Charles could sense that Paris meant a workload worthy of an ass – to get back to the time we were talking about
. . .

A few hours earlier, Sam had won the final qualifying races hands down, and they were all camped out on the far side of the paddocks
.

What an expedition
. . .

Ramon and his driver had left the night before, at their own pace and to have time to warm up, so they had slept on site
.

‘If you make it through the first round,’ said Kate, putting her basket under her seat, ‘we’ll come with our sleeping bags and camp out under the stars with all of you to lend you our support in your ordeal . . .’

‘Only lend, Auntie Kate? Why not give?’

‘Thank you sweetheart but I know what I’m saying . . . Because I’ve been
giving
my support to you and your ass for ten years already . . . Does that suit you, Charles?’

Oh, Charles . . . Everything suited him . . . His thoughts were already being invaded by clauses about late penalties . . . And this would give him the chance to sleep less than a hundred metres away from her, for once
. . .

He was saying that just for the hell of it, no? He’d abandoned any
dreams
of getting his leg over a long time ago . . . This woman needed a friend more than she needed a man. That was it. Thank you. He’d got the picture. Bah . . . Friends, as Jacques Brel would say, are less perishable . . . On the quiet in his little room he would pour himself little drams of Port Ellen, and drink to the health of the wonderful holiday companion that he’d become
.

Cheers.

Naturally, the children had jumped for joy and rushed off to their rooms to stock up on heavy jumpers and packets of biscuits. Alice painted a magnificent banner
, Come on, Ramon!,
but Sam made her promise not to unfurl it unless he was victorious
.

‘It might make Ramon lose his concentration, you understand?’

They all rolled their eyes. They knew that that stubborn beast would balk at a fly farting or a blade of grass pointing in the wrong direction
.

They weren’t up on the podium just yet
. . .

So, there they all sat, cross-legged round a campfire, some roasting sausages, others roasting marshmallows, some Camembert, others bits of bread, and their laughter and stories melted into the, um, pleasantly contrasting aromas. Every last one of their friends had come along. Bob Dylan was practising his scales, the little women were reading the palms of the little girls, Yacine was explaining to Charles that this particular spider’s web had been woven close to the ground in order to catch jumping insects, like grasshoppers, for example, whereas that one, see, up there, well, that’s for flying insects . . . Logical, isn’t it? Logical. And Charles is very friendly with his best mate. After fixing her a club sandwich, he went to steal a bale of bay to place behind the small of her back
. . .

Sigh
. . .

Kate had been particularly agitated since her mother arrived
.

‘Is it to get away from her that we’re all having a wild time over here tonight?’ he asked
.

‘Could be . . . It’s stupid, isn’t it? At my age, to still be so sensitive to my old mum’s moods . . . It’s because she reminds me of other times. A time when I was the youngest and the most carefree . . . I feel down, Charles . . . I miss Ellen. Why can’t she be here tonight? I imagine that the reason people have children is to experience moments like this, no?’

‘She is here, since we’re talking about her,’ he murmured
.

‘And why haven’t you ever had any?’

Charles said nothing
.

‘Children, that is.’

‘Because I have never run into their mother, I suppose . . .’

‘When are you leaving?’

He wasn’t expecting this question. ‘A word’, ‘a word’, ‘a word’, growled his brain, in a panic
.

‘When Sam has won.’

Well done, my hero. You had to go a long way to find that smile
. . .

*

It was nearly eleven o’clock, they were wrapped up in their blankets, keeping watch over the embers, ‘like cowboys’, and trying to come up with the appropriate lullabies. What was that cry? That hissing sound? That rustling? What sort of bird? Or beast? And what was that distant braying?

‘Courage, comrades! In a few hours we won’t have to entertain these stupid bipeds any more!’

And then a voice, Leo’s perhaps, came quavering: ‘You know what . . . it’s time to tell ghost stories . . .’

A few raptor-like shrieks encouraged him. He embarked on a very gory tale full of viscera and haemoglobin, with cruel Martians and transgenic bumble bees. Nice try, but . . . it was hardly the sort of thing that would keep them from sleeping
.

Kate raised the stakes even higher: ‘Heliogabalus? Does that ring a bell?’

Nothing but the crackling of the flames
.

‘There were a lot of nutters among the Roman emperors, but I think this one took the biscuit . . . Right, he came to power when he was fourteen, entering Rome on a chariot pulled by naked women . . . Off to an excellent start . . . He was mad. Mad as a hatter. The story goes that he would sprinkle crushed gems on all his food, and put pearls in his rice, and he liked to eat bizarre, cruel dishes, and he craved stews made from tongue of nightingale and parrot, and coxcomb torn from the live animal, and he fed his circus animals with foie gras, and one day he massacred six hundred ostriches to eat their brains while they were still warm, and he adored the vulvae of I don’t remember which sort of female, and he . . . Well, I’ll stop there. This was just for starters.’

Even the flames did not burn as bright
.

‘The anecdote which I’m sure Leo wants to hear goes like this: Heliogabalus was renowned for the orgiastic banquets he hosted . . . Every time had to be better than the previous one. Worse, in other words. He had to have ever more massacres, more terror, more rapes, more orgies, more food, more alcohol . . . In short, more of everything. The problem was that he got bored very quickly
.
So one day, he asked a sculptor to make him a metal bull that would be hollow inside with just a little door on one side and a hole where the mouth was so that he could hear the sound emerging. At the beginning of his lovely parties, they’d open the door and then lock a slave inside. When Heliogabalus began to get a little bored, he’d ask another slave to light a fire underneath the bull, and at that point all his guests would draw closer with smiles on their faces. Oh yes. It was really funny because the bull, you see, would start bellowing.’

Gulp
.

Dead silence
.

‘Is that a true story?’ asked Yacine
.

‘Absolutely.’

While the children wiggled and shivered, she turned to Charles and murmured, ‘I won’t tell them this, obviously, but – for me it’s a metaphor for all humanity . . .’

My God. She really did have a bad case of the blues. Something had to be done
.

‘Yes, but . . .’ he continued, fairly loudly in order to drown out the sounds of their disgust, ‘that guy died a few years later, I think he was only eighteen, in the toilet, by suffocating on the sponge he used to wipe his own arse.’

‘Is that true?’ asked Kate, astonished
.

‘Absolutely.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Montaigne told me.’

She pulled on her blanket, winking: ‘You are brilliant.’

‘Absolutely.’

But not for long. The story he told, about how they always found bones
whenever they started digging a construction site, and how they mustn’t let anyone find out, otherwise the investigation would spoil the concrete that was ready to be poured, and make them lose a lot of money, well, all that failed to leave anyone remotely shaken
.

That one fell flat
.

As for Samuel, he recalled the only French lit. class during which he had not fallen asleep:

‘It was the story of this young bloke, a peasant, who refused to enlist as just another piece of meat in Napoleon’s army . . . Something they called the blood tribute . . . It lasted five years, and you were sure to die
like
a dog, but if you had money, you could pay someone else to go in
your place
. . .

‘He didn’t have a brass farthing, so he deserted
.

‘The prefect summoned the bloke’s father, gave him hell and humiliated him, but the poor old guy
really
didn’t know where his son had gone. A bit later he found him starved to death in the forest, with the grass he’d been trying to eat stuck between his teeth. So the old man put his son over his shoulder and carried him without saying a word to anyone for three leagues until he got to the prefecture
.

‘That bastard of a prefect was at a ball. When he came home at two in the morning he found the poor peasant on his doorstep, and the old man says, “Well, you wanted me to find my son, Monsieur le Préfet, and here he is.” Then he put the corpse up against the wall and cleared off.’

Now that was spicier . . . Sam wasn’t dead sure, but he thought it was by that Balzac bloke
.

The girls didn’t have any stories, and Clapton wanted to keep the mood just the way it was . . . Gling, gling. He plucked some really macabre staccatos in the meanwhile
.

Yacine volunteered
.

‘Right, I warn you, it’ll be short.’

‘Is it the one about the slug massacre?’ someone asked worriedly
.

‘No, it’s about the lords from the Franche-Comté and Haute-Alsace. The counts from Montjoie and the lords of Méchez, if you prefer . . .’

Some grumbling from the cowherd quarter. If this was going to be some intellectual stuff, thanks a lot
.

The poor storyteller, tripped up just as he was hitting his stride, didn’t know whether he should continue
.

‘Go on,’ hissed Hattie, ‘give us the one about the dubbing and the salt tax. We love it.’

‘No, it’s not about the salt tax, that’s just it, it’s about something called the “the right to lounge”.’

‘Oh, reeeally? You mean, like sling hammocks between the battlements?’

‘Not at all,’ said Yacine, clearly annoyed, ‘you’re really dumb. During the harsh winter nights, the lords had, so to speak, and I quote, “the right to disembowel two of their serfs in order to warm their feet in their smoking bowels”, close quotes, by virtue, as I just told you, of this “right to lounge”. There. That’s all.’

It wasn’t a flop at all, actually. There were a few calls of ‘yuck’ and
‘gross’ and ‘are you sure?’ and ‘that sucks’, all of which warmed his heart just as effectively
.

‘Right then,’ announced Kate, ‘we’re not about to improve on that one this evening . . . Time for bed.’

There were already a few shouts of irritation against sleeping-bag zippers when a faint little voice rose in protest: ‘But I have a story, too . . .’

No. They were not stupefied. They were petrified
.

Sam, with his usual class, said jokingly to defuse the moment, ‘Are you sure your story’s horrible, Nedra?’

She nodded
.

‘Because if it’s not,’ he added, ‘you’d do better to keep your mouth shut for once.’

The laughter that followed made him want to go on
.

Charles looked at Kate
.

What was the word she’d used the other night? Numb
.

She was numb
.

Numb and with deeply etched dimples on the lookout
.

‘It’s the story about a urtwur . . .’

‘Huh?’

‘What?’

‘Speak louder, Nedra!’

The fire, the dogs, the raptors, even the wind, were hanging on her every word
.

She cleared her throat: ‘A, um, earthworm.’

Kate was on her knees
.

‘Well, um, one morning he comes out and sees another earthworm. And he says, “Fine day, isn’t it?” But the other one doesn’t say a thing. So he says it again, “Fine day, isn’t it?” Still he doesn’t answer . . .’

It was tricky because she was speaking more and more softly, and no one dared interrupt her
.

‘“Do you live round here?” he went on, wiggling ’cos he was all embarrassed, but the other one still didn’t say a thing, so the earthworm that was all annoyed turned round in his hole and said, “Oh drat, there I went talktootelgen.”’

‘What?’ protested the audience in frustration. ‘Speak more clearly, Nedra! We didn’t understand a thing! What did he say?’

She looked up, her little face a pout of confusion, and removed the lock of hair that she’d been chewing on at the same time as her words, then
valiantly
uttered once again, ‘“Oh drat, there I went talking to my tail again!”’

It was a sweet moment, because the others didn’t know whether they ought to smile or pretend to be horrified
.