The House with Blue Shutters (2 page)

They shuffled off. Aisling looked at the clock, went to the fridge, and poured herself a glass of white wine.

That evening, Claudia Wesson lay in the guest bathroom at Murblanc, rubbing bubbles off her new Tiffany engagement ring. Alex
would so absolutely have gone to Tiffany. Claudia had accepted Alexander Harvey’s proposal the day after she knew for certain
that she was pregnant with Sébastien’s child. She repeated this information to herself, in the third person, as she reached
into the pocket of her discarded pyjamas and extracted a cigarette. Alex hated her smoking. She lay back in the water, but
the sharp nicotine mingled foully with the steam and she lurched forward, flipped up the loo seat and vomited, discreetly
flushing at the same time in case any of the Harveys should hear. Crouched, shuddering, her knees in the water and her breasts
squashed against the taps, she rested her chin on the rim and thought that she would have to give up now, anyway. Alex tapped
on the door, ‘Aisling says supper in half an hour, darling.’

Claudia closed her eyes. She wanted the evening to be gone; she wanted darkness and cold air on her skin, to be alone and
numbing herself with cognac. She had begged Alex to take her to France when she had received Sébastien’s letter, a few days
after she had fled from that terrible, humiliating, drunken scene in Paris. She had worked out cleanly in her mind the announcement
of the pregnancy, had gone through her diary to fix precisely where she would muddle the dates. It was a mercy at least, she
thought, that Alex was dark like Sébastien, with brown eyes, and a greater blessing that, exuberantly and
magnanimously in love, he had declared to her a few weeks before that he wouldn’t care if she threw away her pills. She was
quite safe.

There was just this evening to be got through. ‘I will bear it,’ she thought, constructing the words as though she were a
character in a book, a penurious Victorian heroine about to hold fast against a drawing room of terrible aunts. There was
just the dinner, and the announcement, to which she could respond demurely and blushingly to the questions about churches
and dresses that would surely follow after the congratulations. He would understand when she told him, not feel it too much
when she would explain that she preferred something simple and low-key, under the circumstances. There was a strain of meanness
in Alex upon which she relied to console him for her projected rejection of a showy wedding. He tended to look too closely
at bills, even for presents or restaurant meals, had a troubled laugh for the price of her face cream. This strain had offended
her in the past, as when, on holiday in Greece, she had gone into rather forced raptures about a hotel room in Santorini,
very bare and plain, with rich blue shutters and a view of the sea. She said that she had always dreamed of such a room, that
it was inspiring in its austerity. ‘Yes,’ Alex had said, ‘and it costs nothing.’ Now, thought Claudia, this penny-pinching
could be pushed into necessary practicality, into the tedious business of selling their two flats and organizing a mutual
life. She had already employed it, persuading him into a month at his brother’s house by showing that two extra weeks of unpaid
leave would not be a great loss, since they would save the price of two weeks in a hotel if they stayed with Jonathan and
Aisling for nothing.

Murblanc certainly was fetching, a long, low house, creamy-stoned as the name suggested, with a hump of third storey slouching
on one side. Jonathan had taken her over it proudly as soon as they arrived, the kitchen, the dining room with the big beamed
fireplace, his study (though, apart from a stack of computer games, Claudia thought, it looked unused), the drawing room on
the first floor, the three bathrooms, five bedrooms, attic sitting room for Aisling, who had always wanted a room of her own,
high up. Jonathan had gone on rather, about the bathrooms, particularly the lavatories which seemed to involve some personal
triumph with a recalcitrant builder and the location of the
fosse
, and Claudia had thought about Sébastien because she thought of nothing else.

This bath was huge, standing alone in front of a large window with floor-length linen curtains, striped in primrose and ivory.
The room gave on to the front of the house, where Claudia could see a track, turning lilac in the sunset, leading up to a
line of slender, pointed trees surrounding a plain square farmhouse high on the hill. She must mention the lovely view to
Aisling. She would be safe here, if she could not, not think of Sébastien. She touched her ring again, screwing it around
her finger so that it wrenched at her skin, white and puffy from the cooling water. Lucky after all, really. She would be
Mrs Harvey, and there was nothing better to hope for.

Pop pop pop, the tiny screech of the ball in the air, and the whistle behind, intense as a soap bubble in sunlight, bursting
in the silver weight of the mist. Oriane hears the guns, knows the hunt is out. She sighs, drops the broom and runs out into
the yard, her eyes searching the skyline to find where, for sure, William is.

Pop! Pop! Sucking the noise around the whorl of William’s ear, way down the valley from Saintonge, up over the hill at Teulière,
swooping along to the meadow of the chateau, where the peacock cries steady against the staccato of the guns, the lacy whisper
of the leaves drawn in now, dense and crisp where the boar are running, crunch and thud along the bottom of the fields, delicate
in the high chestnuts the squeak of a crow against the scream of the green and blue birds in the high walled park, Papie Nadl’s
donkey gasping like an ancient horn, pop pop pop the guns, and always the tendrils of the thrushes’ tongues lapping at his
ear, high fluttering kisses of noise, and
William breaks from the row of hunters, runs whirling and dancing along the line of the guns, whilst trilling for freedom
the boar and her two babies escape down the bank and William claps his hands at their excited snorting. Red pain makes silence.
William holds his icy hand to his burning ear and howls, roars so the whole valley can hear his sound, collapsing hiccuping
crazily on the wet grey ground.

William rolls up like a beetle and rootles his nose into the grass, warming it with his breath. In the earth, he hears his
sister’s boots, pounding down the field.

‘For shame,’ shouts Oriane. ‘Don’t you know the boy is not quite finished?’

William does not look up, but he knows Oriane will have her hands on her hips under her apron, bunching the cloth so her body
stands even skinnier between the folds, like a poppy-dolly. Her knuckles stroke his sore face. ‘Look at him! All over mud.
You should know better, the lot of you! Come on now, William, come on home.’

Shame is a word William recognizes, a hissing word with the sting of a slap within it. The sound and the sense come usually
together. ‘For shame, William,’ says his mother, reaching across the table as he dribbles his soup, cuffing him with a bent
hand so that her knuckles crack hard across his cheekbone, ‘For shame,’ as William rolls howling across the kitchen floor,
her anger dull and hard as the crack of the iron ladle across his skull. Sometimes Oriane uses the word, and then its power
dims, quietens, leaking its force until the house is silent.

‘For shame, Maman,’ gathering a bundle of William into her arms, as her mother lays her head on the long oak boards
and sobs too, the sound passing back to the wetness of her despair. ‘For shame, for shame,’ until William hears the poplars
bow in the shudder of her sobbing breath and creeps back to her crabwise across the smooth dirt floor and lays his head against
her broken heart, drumming to the hum of his blood outside in the darkness of the trees. Shame is stilled then, the logs shift
in the fire, William forgets until the next day or the next when Shame grows strong, dances in the tightness of his mother’s
lips until her hands are possessed by it and reach once more to batter it from her.

Shame hovers around Aucordier’s. The square pale stone house and the two barns scoop and cup it like the wind that scrapes
forever across the plain and pauses between the roofs, twisting down the chimneys and sidling under the doors, whipping the
wash into contortions and scattering the chickens with dust until it emerges as a whisper of a breeze, unfelt in the village
down the valley. Oriane knows, as William does not, the elements of shame, can count them clear as fat clouds in a blue summer
sky.

Her father was a shame, a roaring stinking storm of it, until he subsided in their mother’s bedroom into a whimpering puff,
worn out with the drink. One.

Her mother wore his shame in the purple lumps of her eyes, which, when they paled sufficiently for the Aucordiers to go to
church, glowed horribly bright and obvious against the faded mauve of her Sunday hat. Two.

William is a shame, poor thing, dumb and hopeless, a lolling child whose scent is the high sour smell of the less than loved,
the ferment of loneliness carried in the skin of the old and the ugly. Three.

Oriane knows that William’s shame is her parents’, the result of something too much more than cousinly affection in the Aucordier
family. Four. This is a dripping shame which has seeped into her, she does not know how, curdling inside her and sticking
like the sucking mud of the yard after rain. ‘
La terre amoureuse’
they call it, when the mud clings so and there’s nothing to be done in the fields and Oriane goes to school, scraping soft
new words on to her slate. The schoolhouse has a big stove and the floor is made of wood. School is for rainy days, and Oriane
likes the French lesson, because the pictures in the story book have nothing to do with Castroux, or mud or shames. Cécile
and her brother Jean live in a pale, precise world where the sun is always shining and Papa takes them for a ride in
le bateau
on
la mer bleue
, while Maman waits behind in a long white dress and a big hat with a pink ribbon to prepare
le goûter
, which is
du pain
with
de la confiture
. French is clear, it forms itself cleanly, dividing the world into
le
and
la
. Cécile and Maman have pink ribbons, Jean and Papa blue shirts. Mademoiselle Lafage the schoolteacher says that Occitan is
a dirty, primitive language, and she raps at the big boys with her ruler when they whisper dirty things at the back. Oriane
sits up very straight, so straight it hurts the bottom of her spine, and tries to take no notice when big boys howl at her
like her brother the werewolf, dribbling and biting at their arms, hunching one shoulder up to their ear and letting the other
arm swing low to the ground, grunting.

Four shames, one for each corner of the house, like the scallop shells carved to welcome pilgrims.

Oriane is too busy, mostly, for the counting of shame. William stayed at first in the kitchen with their grandmother, porridge
and saliva oozing tepid on two formless chins, two bewildered mouths straining for words they couldn’t find. It was quite
a surprise when William outlived her. Now William is old enough at least to be trusted not to fall into the fire, and Oriane
no longer has to secure him to the laundry pole with a long loop of rope when she goes outside. Now he wanders about the yard
like a chicken, unable to help Oriane with her easiest jobs, like sacking potatoes. She tries to teach him, dragging him to
the pump with the bucket, giving him a line of string to hold as she ties up the peas, but William makes no effort, merely
wanders peacefully away with the bucket spilling in the dirt, and lies with his huge ear to the ground, as though he were
listening for moles. Sometimes Oriane wants to rush at him, to beat him with her dirty fists and splayed nails, she feels
her mother’s fury within her as she strains to carry the logs or mend the high door of the big barn that the wind bursts through,
contemptuously, several times a week, but she stops herself, as four shames are enough for anybody.

Oriane sleeps with her mother, now that her father is dead. They get up just after the light, and Oriane slices the hard bread
and makes the coffee as her mother dresses. Aucordier’s had been a big farm once, but the fields mostly went in her father’s
time, and Oriane’s mother sold the last but one to old Papie Nadl, down the hill at Murblanc. Sometimes Papie’s donkeys escape
and Oriane has to chase them from the plum trees. In the evening, if she is not too tired, Oriane walks down the hill towards
Castroux, to meet her mother who goes out
for the grapes or the cherries, the melons or the apples, to the chateau for the laundry or sometimes across to Saintonge
to Chauvignat’s pigs. Oriane minds William, hoes and weeds the vegetables, washes the clothes and fetches the water, feeds
the chickens and the three goats and the baleful, scabby rabbits, milks and collects eggs, sweeps the house and makes the
beds, sweeps the ashes and fetches the wood, hoes William and feeds the vegetables and washes the goats. As she goes about,
she names things in French,
le grenier
,
la poule
,
mon frère
. Many of the children in the village hardly speak French at all, and many of the mamies and papies too, though Mademoiselle
can’t rap at them with her stick. Oriane speaks Occitan with her mother, but she likes to translate the words inside her head
as they talk, so that there is always a part of her that is somewhere else.

William is a musician. High up on the plateau, he seeks sounds beneath the dull bass of wind that curries forever along the
plain. His ears can separate the song of the fat little oriels from the swish of the poplar leaves and the cries of the children
playing
rescoundut
far below in the village square. Long ago, he beat time with a metal spoon as his mother scoured the pots at the pump, jigging
his grandmother’s compliant hand as accompaniment. The air made an organ of the spread of bone beneath a hawk’s wing, carried
the soprano scream of a rabbit beneath a fox. William danced to the angelus as it sang up the hill from Castroux, bounced
to the chop of the tractor blades as they hummed in Nadl’s fields. Everything he knows, he knows through sounds, the rain
comes when the wind gathers the clouds together, the soup will taste thick and salty when Oriane moves the paddle through
the bacon and barley,
sleep is the knock of the loose shutter that bumps through the nights.