The House with Blue Shutters (27 page)

‘You’ll be wanting to have the wedding, then?’ he said coldly.

He couldn’t know, that was the thing. He had been dead drunk, had fallen asleep snoring as he was kissing her on the bed.
She had tugged off his trousers and drawers, trying not to look at the thick purpled sole of the stump, and had arranged the
covers over him. The sheet was prepared with a dab of rabbit’s blood she had poured into a medicine bottle
when she and Cathérine had prepared the stew. When he awoke she was downstairs with her hair tidy under a handkerchief, and
she blushed at him as she served his coffee.

‘There’s no need for that. With things the way they are, everyone will understand if we wait, like we planned.’

‘I’ll tell my mother. She’ll be pleased, I daresay.’

‘Are you pleased, Laurent?’

‘What do you think?’

She didn’t dare to answer, just followed him meekly out of the garden.

There was a massive oak beam out in the barn, the strut of a mill-wheel. It had been lying there for years but the wood was
supple and dry. Flexing the powerful muscles of his abdomen until they held him firm, Laurent swung the axe. It was too bad.
Everyone in Castroux would be having a joke at his expense, saying he went rutting like a swine after one too many with old
Lesprats. Disgusting. He was terribly disappointed that Oriane had allowed this to happen, men could not help themselves after
all, it was up to the women to see that they behaved. Laurent had been shocked on his recent trips to the market at Landi,
to see how some of them carried on. There were girls in Landi, bold girls from big cities who had come back to their country
relations in 1940. They swaggered about arm in arm, with powdered faces and cigarettes stuck in greasy red mouths. He had
even seen Cécile Chauvignat furtively smoking as she unpacked her sausages. Laurent might trade with them in Landi, but he
still saw himself as set apart from those sluts, who seemed to represent everything that was wrong with things lately.
Worse than the women were the men, who sat back and watched French women demean themselves, conniving at the disgusting behaviour.
As usual, Laurent felt cheated. As he saw it, the high-ups had talked plenty about the noble sweat of the French farmer when
they wanted to line them all up and cart them off to Alsace to be shot to bits. Now the very same men said they had to submit
to price fixing, practically giving that famous old sweat away while people went hungry. Laurent’s argument did not admit
the fact that no one in Castroux was any hungrier than they had ever been. So it was one thing to get yourself a fair price
and not be cheated by those liars in Vichy, but it was quite another to lie down and let them fuck you. There was a part of
Laurent that believed they had got what they deserved, really. When you looked at how weak and sloppy and stupid people were,
they weren’t fit to be in charge themselves. It was confusing, but more than ever, you had to keep your self-respect. He would
make it up, though. Once he had the centre out he could hollow it out with the lathe, to make a real little cradle.

William was confused. There was a man asleep in the goat house. Usually, he rattled his stick gleefully in the scrap bucket
as he made his way down the path and the goats bounded up to meet him, nosing for crusts. Today all he had was a bundle of
hay, because Oriane said there were no scraps for the goats any more. William hoped they would not be hungry. The man was
not dead, like the black goat that William had found in the straw, he was snoring. William heard the snores all the way up
in the yard, a rich stew of a sound, so he set the hay down silently and opened the door just a crack to see. The goats were
snickering, butting their heads towards the light.

‘Shh!’ William whispered to them, and pulled the door just wide enough for them to slip out. The man was wrapped in a blanket
with his boots sticking out at the bottom, and a cap over his face, but William could see that he had a beard. He didn’t know
what to do. Oriane was away to work and he was all alone, so he was not supposed to leave the yard, but there shouldn’t be
a man in the goat house. He might be a bad man.
Was it a secret? He shut the door slowly, slowly so it didn’t creak, and walked away with his feet splayed and soft in his
boots, pressing the earth so he would not make a noise, though the snoring continued regular. The mist was so thick down here
that the goats had disappeared, but William could hear their jaws working as they chewed sadly at the bare twigs poking out
of the hedge. Poor goats.

It was very cold, William was grateful to get back to the kitchen fire. He wanted to play the violin, but his head was too
full of the snoring man. He opened his mouth halfway and made an experimental snorting sound, rattling the air at the top
of his nose. Perhaps he should hide in the barn, but it was so icy outside, he couldn’t bear to leave the room again. He sat
on the edge of the fireplace and snored to himself, making a little grunting tune, up and down, until he heard the noise of
a boot on the frozen ground. He knew the sound of Laurent’s walk, the heavy sole and the lighter tap of the crutch, so he
wasn’t afraid when the door was pushed open. Laurent was carrying an armful of logs.

‘Come on, William, give me a hand. What are you doing sitting around like a granny?’

William considered. He snored again, loud enough to make Laurent start, but Laurent didn’t seem to understand. ‘Shh!’ he added,
triumphantly.

‘That’s right, William, but not now. Now I need you to help me with the wood, see?’

‘Man,’ said William, ‘do-do man.’ He sang a little bit of the song to help Laurent see, ‘Do-do, nenet do.’

‘William, so help me I’ll come over there and clout you if you don’t get off your lazy backside right now. Stop it!’

Now Laurent had an angry voice and William felt tears in his eyes, he was trying so hard. He took the logs from Laurent, put
one on the fire and stacked the others neatly to the side.

‘That’s better, now,’ Laurent’s voice was soft again.

Why didn’t he see? He tried a bleating sound, like a goat.

‘The goats, William? Is there something?’ William nodded so hard his head rattled inside, and they went out together.

The snoring man was still there. Laurent looked about for a stick, but the clear patch in front of the shed was bare. ‘Stay
here, William,’ he whispered, then threw the door wide, shouting, ‘Hey, you! What do you think you’re doing?’

The man woke as swift and silent as a cat, coming upright and snatching the cap from his face in one move, rising to a stooped
stand under the low ceiling. He held both hands wide away from his body. Laurent could see the whites of his eyes in the dimness,
their brightness shocking him just for a second so that he stepped back. He recovered and kept his voice loud, ‘Get out here
then, where we can see you.’

The man moved towards him, leaving the blanket coiled in the shape of his body like a discarded shell. As he stepped into
the light he laughed.

‘You can stop that then,’ he said in Occitan. ‘
Bonjorn
, Laurent.’

All the explanation Laurent needed was in the cock of Jean-Claude’s head towards William, the speculative widening of the
eyes. Whilst he understood, he was uncertain how to act. It was cold, JC was probably hungry, but immediately the simple solution
to this became tangled with difficulty. At least it was William who had found him, not Oriane. He put an
arm around JC, clapping him on the shoulder, trying to seem hearty.

‘It’s fine, William. This is my friend. He came to look for me, see?’ Oriane would not return for several hours, they had
a little time.

William banged the logs down as loudly as he dared. The snoring man was not a bad man because he was eating terrine by the
fire with Laurent, with lumps of rabbit in it, but William had found him and he was piling the logs while they sat there.
He had tried to show the man his violin, but Laurent told him to unload the wood from the wagon and stack it in the barn.
Snoring man’s voice was higher and lighter than Laurent’s. He was talking and talking while Laurent said yes yes, he didn’t
stop even when his mouth was full of bread and something else that William suspected might be walnuts from the jar in the
buffet
in brown wine, just talked with gummy teeth and crumbs in his beard. William could hear every word of the conversation perfectly,
and would have perhaps understood a great deal more than Laurent suspected, but words were the least interesting of noises,
even when they were addressed directly to him. Still, sometimes he had to speak. His fingers were crabbed and purple from
the icy air, stiffening so they hardly bent around the wood. He opened the door. ‘Lazy backside!’ he crowed loudly, knowing
quite well that this was rude.

The snoring man laughed, ‘He’s right, Laurent. I should be off.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘Best not to say. But you’ll do as I told you?’

‘I’ll try. Here, take some bread. And my coat, take my coat.’

The snoring man stuffed the bread into his pocket. Laurent was pitched awkwardly on his crutch, trying to wriggle out of his
jacket.

‘No, better not. I’ll do fine.
Adieu
, Laurent.’

‘
Adieu
.’

They shook hands. The snoring man waved to William as he passed him in the yard, but he did not go out to the road, he turned
back to the path and disappeared down the hill past the goat house.

‘Come on, William. Do you want to go for a ride?’

William took his violin as usual, and Laurent did not prevent him. They set off towards Murblanc to fetch the motorbike.

The Larivière house was on the edge of the village, above the church on the Landi road, a fine building with a row of tall,
green-shuttered windows on the first floor. By the time they arrived, their ears were skinned from the frost. William stretched
his legs to the ground as Laurent had shown him, steadying the bike so that he could dismount more easily. When Madame Larivière
opened the door, a rich mist of stew steamed around their noses. ‘We were about to have lunch,’ she said wearily.

‘I’m sorry,’ Laurent began, ‘but I need to speak to the mayor. Could you take William into the kitchen, please, Madame?’

‘Well, no, I don’t think so. This isn’t a soup kitchen, you know, Laurent Nadl. You can both come back later.’

Laurent didn’t have the words for this, didn’t know how to make her understand. He leaned forward, ‘I’ve seen Jean-Claude.’

He shouldn’t have come out with it like that, she called out and began to cry, and it was some while before Monsieur Larivière
persuaded her to sit quiet in the kitchen while Laurent explained. The two men went into the parlour, which was as cold as
the tomb, despite the thick crocheted curtains at the window. Laurent thought longingly of the kitchen fire and chicken in
thick gravy with shallots.

‘Well, Laurent?’ Larivière was upright in an armchair, his fingers digging in to the worn red upholstery. Laurent handed over
the letter Jean-Claude had given him, and stood politely by the window. The valley looked different from here, raw and flat
where the land ran to the Landine, the fields scoured with cold. The chateau hill seemed steep and aggressive, though perhaps
that was because from the mayor’s window the flag was squarely in view, its red more vivid than ever in the thick white winter
light. Laurent stared out, feeling the silence thicken behind him, hoping that the other man would not weep. He did not turn
back until Larivière spoke.

‘So he was in Spain?’

‘He said so, yes. In Paris before that.’ Jean-Claude had told him very little. All Laurent’s memories were contained by the
moment in which he saw Jean-Claude’s face. Already he mourned his unappeased longing to speak, to know that Jean-Claude remembered.
He sensed that JC’s past was occupied, pressured down by what had happened since, so that what was huge in Laurent took up
only a small space, now, in him. He had said nothing about the leg, though perhaps that too was because a time when Laurent
was whole was no longer present or interesting to him. Laurent had listened, and agreed without thinking, and now he had begun
it.

‘He said that what he wanted to tell you was in the letter. He was very sorry that he could not pass by to see his mother.’
JC had said nothing of the kind. ‘But he had come to tell you something else, that is, I’m supposed to tell you, so you know
what to do. He said he was lucky to find me up at Aucordier’s, he was planning to come down to Murblanc tonight.’

‘Go on.’

JC had asked Laurent to repeat what he told him, slow and clear, with the names. Since the recruiters had come for the
Relève
, when Emile Chauvignat had left alone, it seemed as though Castroux had been forgotten. But with the failure of the new law,
the government was finding even conscription for the STO inadequate. More workers were necessary for Germany to win the war.

‘They’re desperate, do you see?’ JC had asked excitedly, spitting crumbs. ‘Sauckel can’t meet the quotas, the Reich is demanding
more and more labour. It’s the beginning of the end.’

There was a list of names of
réfractaires
, and the
Milice
had resorted to
shanghaillage
. Laurent pronounced it carefully. It meant raids on whole quarters in the towns. A cinema audience had been impounded in
Toulouse and the men marched away to the train there and then.

‘And how does Jean-Claude know all this, about the
Service du Travail
?’

‘He’s been in Cahors. He said he’d come from there. He told me a list.’

‘Of Castroux men?’

Laurent felt as though he was repeating a lesson. ‘Not you
or me. No one over sixty. François Boissière, Nic Dubois, Jean Charrot, Yves Contier, Bernard and Marcel Vionne—’

‘Hilaire?’

‘Charrot? Yes, but he might be able to get exemption if he proves he mills as well as bakes. Otherwise yes. Not William Aucordier,
obviously, and the other lads are seventeen.’

‘So seven, if we count Charrot.’