The House with Blue Shutters (41 page)

‘Well,’ Aisling said, wiping her face, ‘it’ll be over my dead body, that’s all, no matter what that bastard thinks about bloody
investments.’

‘Aisling, I know it might sound funny, but tell me again about those frescoes.’

‘Peaceful,’ said Alex by the pool as the distant howls subsided.

‘As far as I can see,’ said Jonathan, ‘the problem with this place is there’s always some bloody woman crying.’

‘Maybe it’s cursed, Dad,’ offered Richard, spearing a salty tomato. ‘Maybe there’s ghosts here.’

‘Does that mean we’re moving back to London?’ asked Olly.

‘I doubt it. Imagine how potty your mother would go there.’

That night, Aisling sat alone in the kitchen when the others had gone to bed. She had made a pot of coffee and filched another
cigarette from Claudia’s handbag. Everyone seemed to be doing that, she thought ruefully. Spread open before her were the
blue and orange notebooks. She had Alex to thank, really, with his stupid impersonations. She began to circle recipes with
her pencil.
Tagliata
of Charolais beef with morel sauce, salad of pigeon breast with pear and hazelnut, mint sorbet with iced cherry compote.
She could do this, she realized. Bugger Comtesse fucking Delphine and bugger Jonathan too. Though he was right in a way, it
was about time she pulled her weight. Her book would be called
La Maison Bleue: Recipes from a French Kitchen
. The cover would be a photograph, one of the ones she had taken for Mrs Highland that first season, the shutters the exact
colour of a summer sky. With a delicious sense of wickedness, she allowed the fag end to buzz out in her coffee cup. It was
handy, in the end,
that she wasn’t pretty, the way Claudia was. The viewers would feel reassured by that, like Delia.

Alex left the next morning. He felt there was no point sitting out the last few days for the sake of it, and it was easy to
say he had been called back to the office. Claudia was still wearing her ring, Alex said he preferred not to make any awkwardness
and that he could phone up Jonathan after she had caught her train. She was submissive, solicitous in her comfort of his bereavement.

‘It’s just as well we didn’t tell too many people,’ he said.

‘Alex, I can’t just keep telling you how sorry I am. It won’t make it any less awful, I know that. But I do believe you deserve
better.’

He looked at her in disappointment for the first time, and she told herself she had no right to mind it.

‘Claudia, do you think I’m blind? Of course I deserve better. I always knew that you didn’t love me as much, as much as someone
else. You spend all your time making people think you’re perfect, and so long as they do you’re satisfied, and you don’t care
how unreal you make yourself. I felt sorry for you, I thought that if you knew you could rely on me loving you that you might
just relax a bit. I didn’t want better, Claudia, I wanted you.’

‘Shall we meet in London?’ Craven. Alex was right.

‘I don’t think there’s much point, do you? But you can always call me if you need anything.’

They made a decent job of concealing from the Harveys their relief to be away from each other. After he had driven away, Claudia
took the bicycle to the chateau. The leaves in
the avenue were tea coloured, beginning to drift down and coat the grass. It seemed for ever away, Giles Froggett and his
ankle. It was a beautiful place, Claudia could see how the avenue would look in a brochure, shot at dusk with the shadows
thick and the house opening up at the top like a lost castle. Claudia wondered if Delphine was planning to put the SS slaughter
in her brochure. She was still amazed by how relieved she felt, by how lightly she had got off. Everything was suddenly, wonderfully
simple, she could even feel sorry for herself if she wanted to – Aisling certainly did.

The Marquis came out to meet her, holding a dog by its collar in each hand. He was very pleased to see her, though, correctly,
he said nothing about what he had intimated at the
fëte
. They sat on the lawn with glasses of stickily un-iced lemonade, and he asked politely about the Sternbachs.

‘I wonder if they’ll be glad in the end?’ he said, when she explained. ‘It’s terrible, the things that were done here. Not
so well known as Oradour, of course, but dreadful, dreadful.’ There was a sort of pride in his voice. Claudia didn’t want
to get started on the war, so she asked him quite directly about the hotel, what he thought?

‘Delphine seems very confident. There are the boys to think of, naturally. In a way it’s no longer my business.’

She asked if he would take her inside. She had brought her camera and a notebook, a torch from the Harveys’ barn, and the
puffy bronzer brush she had washed carefully in shampoo and dried with her hairdryer. They were indoors for nearly an hour,
and, when they came out squinting on to the steps, the Marquis shook her hand and said that in any case, they would have to
meet now, in Paris. He mentioned La Perouse,
which was as good a hint as any. Claudia pretended she didn’t know the anecdote about ‘
Bel Ami
’, and the courtesans scratching their diamonds on the mirrors to see if they were real. Rather obvious, but the old chap
had style. Claudia grinned all the way down the hill, thinking perhaps I will and perhaps I won’t.

The Sternbachs were gone too, with a basket of biscuits and preserves that suggested Aisling felt guilty about her neglect
of the barbecue. Aisling was down at La Maison Bleue supervizing Madame Lesprats and no doubt getting every last bit of information
about the plans at the chateau. Claudia did a bit of peering from the balcony and ascertained that Ginette’s bicycle was also
there. She used the house phone to call Sébastien and thought while she was waiting for the connection that he would surely
answer, as surely as he would not have done before Malcolm Glover, unlikely messenger of the gods, knocked her down. He picked
up on the third ring.

‘Claudia! You’re in France.’

‘Bravo, Sherlock.’ It seemed strange after all she had felt and struggled with that her voice sounded just as usual.

‘Are you being bucolic?’

‘Dangerously. Listen, I have to ask you something. You know someone at the
Patrimoine
, right?’

She told him about the frescoes. ‘Obviously not Primatice, but definitely school of. Real Mannerist. The Marquis was pretty
certain they were originals. The dates are all right.’

‘He’s such an old fraud with his Bonnards. Had it never occurred to him before?’

‘He says not. That part of the house is usually shut up,
anyway, it hadn’t been used since before the war. Apparently Delphine went rooting about because she thought it would be marvellous
for the spa.’

‘I’ll give Jean-Jacques a ring and call you back.’

‘Perfect.’

When they hung up, Claudia said out loud to Delphine, ‘That’s the end of you, then.’ She couldn’t tell anyone about her idea
just yet, in case she was wrong, but after seeing the paintings twice she knew she wasn’t. These things did happen, Rembrandts
turning up under coffee tables. The d’Esceyracs had had the house since the early seventeenth century, but the gallery and
the tower were at least fifty years earlier, the Marquis said, built by the Vicomtes who had held the land since early mediaeval
times. It was amazing how little he seemed to know about it. In England, it would all be written up in a guidebook and you
would be able to pay to go around and buy fudge. Aisling would mind much less about a museum, she was tremendously fond of
frescoes after all. Claudia looked out again for the bicycle, then set off up the road to find Oriane.

She knocked cautiously at the door of the farmhouse, then pushed it open when there was no response. The kitchen room was
dim and stuffy, shutters closed against the sun. She found Oriane on a whitish plastic chair around the side of the house,
positioned in the shade of a dilapidated tenement of dirty old rabbit hutches.

‘Hello,’ she called cheerfully as she approached, not wanting to startle the old lady.

‘Claudia. How are you? Ginette told me all about the accident.’

Claudia looked for somewhere to sit and perched on the concrete base of the hutches, holding her knees under her chin.

‘I lost the baby.’

‘Are you sorry?’

‘No. I mean, I probably should be, but I’m glad. I’m glad it wasn’t my fault though, if you understand what I mean.’

‘Yes.’

‘It hurt more than I expected. It hurt a lot.’

‘Not as much as it would have done, all the same.’

‘I wanted to ask before, how did you know, that I was pregnant, I mean?’

‘Did you think I was a witch?’

Claudia smiled, ‘Maybe.’

‘It was your face, that was all. I had the same thing. The skin goes darker, around the cheeks and the forehead, they call
it the mask of pregnancy. English people normally have such pale skin.’

Claudia realized she was right. So simple. She had noticed a crop of freckles on her cheekbones, but thought it was just a
tan and had been irritated because she had spent forty pounds on a La Prairie sunblock.

‘So you had it too?’

‘My baby was conceived in the summer.’

‘Yes, in the war.’

‘Are you still going to marry him then, Monsieur Harvey’s brother?’

‘No. No I’m not going to marry him. I suppose it isn’t necessary now, to be honest. That sounds awful, doesn’t it?’

‘I didn’t think you young people bothered about all that any more.’

Claudia had hunched herself down on the packed dirt, she looked between her knees and said nothing. ‘All that’ she had to
admit in the end, was minding that she wouldn’t have had enough money.

‘What about the other one?’ Oriane asked.

‘I don’t know. He’s not in love with me.’

‘So what will you do, then?’

Claudia thought. The right thing, the empowered emancipated independent adult thing, would be to tell Sébastien, fondly, to
get stuffed. She knew that would not happen. For so long it seemed, she had been lost to herself, casting herself as a tormented
heroine, unable to see her own smallness. She needed Sébastien, and she thought there was little use in feeling ashamed of
that, of pretending she was otherwise. But there was something else, something that had been growing in her since the night
of the accident. After what had happened with Alex, she knew that even marriage with Sébastien was not actually what she wanted.
What she wanted was to make her own thing of that need, to choose other lovers, be hurt, but bearably, at least as long as
she was pretty enough for it not to matter. And she would have a child, but she would choose when and with whom. Sébastien
would suit this new self very well, for a time, and then, and she was excited at the knowledge as it came to her, he would
not. She thought of Aisling. It wasn’t much, but she could try, she thought, to be a little less parochial in her feelings,
to live up to the person she had tried to pretend for so long that she really was. Alex was wrong. She did not dislike herself
so much that she wanted to convince the world she was perfect, quite the contrary. She had merely been afraid of not conforming
to his vision of what she needed, because at heart she had
been too much of a coward to believe she could be happy any other way.

‘I’ll be fine.’

They sat in silence, looking down the valley. There had been no wind at Murblanc, but up here it puffed around the house,
blowing withered straw from the rabbit hovels.

‘Jacky’s father, he tried to make it up to me, in a strange way, but my boy said he hated me, when he went. That I had spoiled
his life and Ginette’s. He spat at me, my Jacky.’

Claudia thought she would sit here a while longer and then ride her bicycle along the lanes and take the train to Paris. It
was a kind of selfishness, trying to manufacture a happy ending because she herself could not stand the pity and the waste,
the sad boys in the photographs and the loneliness of this place.

‘I wanted to say thank you,’ she said awkwardly.

‘Why?’

‘I had a very difficult time here, I was really unhappy. I know I don’t know you, but being able to speak to you so honestly
has been a help, the things you’ve told me, I don’t really understand why, but I’m glad. So thank you.’

This was the moment for Oriane to say something wise, then Claudia would be released, absolved.

‘
Uat aihvair
,’ said Oriane.

‘I’m sorry, what was that? Is it Occitan?’

The old woman was chuckling. ‘No, it’s English. From that programme, the American one where all the friends live in the same
apartment. Ginette loves it. Uat aihvair!’

‘Right,’ said Claudia, ‘yes, right. Whatever.’

Behind the church at Castroux, as in most country churchyards, was the plot reserved for suicides. Mostly, the names on the
plain stones were men’s. Girls got themselves into trouble, but on the whole, Oriane thought, men gave up more easily than
women, and then they were found hanging in the barns, or with their heads blown off with a hunting rifle. Laurent had been
buried in the Nadl family plot though, next to Papie. Jean-Claude Larivière had seen to that, because he was a hero of the
Resistance. Jean-Claude was an important man now, in Cahors, for all that his own poor father had killed himself for shame.
Jacky was playing on the steps of the witch’s house, jumping down with his fat little legs together so his head wobbled at
every bounce. That’s what the children called it, they frightened themselves, daring one another to go in there, though it
was really nothing more than a tiny old cottage used as a toolshed. There had been a sorcerer in Castroux once, Charlotte
said, but he had lived out in the woods and people
went to him so he could read the cards. He had cursed the bellringer for not bringing him a gift of meat, and the next Sunday
when he went to ring the bells one of them fell on his head and killed him stone dead. Charlotte was writing a book on the
old customs of the village, she said they would all die out now the war was over. It kept her busy in the evenings after school.
Oriane found she had lots of stories to tell her when she went down to the schoolhouse sometimes, of men who changed into
wolves at night, and how she always tied Jacky’s hat with a green ribbon, because that was what you did to ward off the grass
snakes who slithered into babies’ cribs as their mothers worked in the vines, to suck the milk from their throats.