The House with Blue Shutters (7 page)

Aisling had appropriated the coffee bowls and filled them with boiling water, into which she unenthusiastically dunked two
Lipton tea bags. Claudia always associated those yellow labels with France, the way Lipton tea always left a white scum on
the surface of the water.

‘It’s a shame, isn’t it?’ Aisling continued in English, following Claudia’s eyes. ‘It could be a wonderful house. I don’t
know
why she doesn’t sell it. The
maison de retraite
at Teulière is really wonderful, they have a marvellous time going on coach trips and playing boules. She could get a fortune
for it you know, there’s the barns too, but you know what the French are like.’ She paused, then added in an accusing tone,
‘I didn’t know you spoke French.’

‘I’ll look out for the doctor, then.’ Claudia took her tea to the doorway and looked down the hill for headlights.

Propriety put the rout to Père Guillaume’s good intentions. Mademoiselle Lafage, the schoolteacher, let it be known that she was looking for lodgings in the village as the Board had seen fit to appoint a master to the schoolhouse, and it was not decent that two unmarried people should share their quarters. Mademoiselle Lafage knew her rights, and applied to the
bureau
in Monguèriac for a boarding allowance. If the Board wanted to throw good money after bad, it was their own affair. Mademoiselle Lafage thought that no schoolmaster would be any more capable than she of prodding knowledge into the lumpish heads of the bigger Castroux boys. Monsieur François Boissière might well be from Toulouse, but she had taken her diploma in Paris, and was more than equal to him. If he thought she was going to waste her education teaching crochet and catechism he would have a surprise, that was all.

So Mademoiselle Lafage went to lodge up at Aucordier’s with that poor child Oriane and her idiot brother. Laurent
Nadl came with a chalky bucket and distempered the walls of the best bedroom, which Oriane had the sense not to mention was where her father had twitched and raved to death. Mademoiselle Lafage’s possessions were dragged up from Castroux on a cart.

They included the artistic blue and yellow curtains that Mademoiselle had sewn and hung herself, and which she couldn’t see were deserved by the new teacher. For the first time in Oriane’s memory, a fire was lit upstairs. Mademoiselle Lafage arranged her books, hung up the framed copy of her diploma, and unpacked, to William’s joy, a large elongated bellows of an instrument that she explained was called a bassoon. She let it be known that she would take her evening meal at the small table in her own room, and afterwards, if William did not become too excited, she allowed him to stand in the doorway as she practised, her legs stretched out in front of her, toes in their black shoes straining to a point on the high notes and her eyes squinting with concentration behind her glasses. The schoolmistress provided her own coffee and sugar, and washed her underthings in the flowered china basin that had belonged to Oriane’s grandmother.

Oriane felt neither obliged nor ungrateful to Mademoiselle Lafage, though she was thankful for the simplicity of her presence.

William was now able to wash and dress himself, and in the early mornings she allowed him to watch the coffee on the fire as she went about the yard, releasing the hens, stuffing bread and hay through the bars of the rabbit cages, watering the goats. On cold days, the little animals were reluctant to leave their warm, pungent stall, and she set William to chase them, flailing his arms and making a strange deep

lowing noise that never failed to startle the silly creatures and send them hopping out into the wind. Sometimes Mademoiselle Lafage would look out of her window, a scarf tied around her sheared brown hair, and laugh as William pursued the goats enthusiastically into the mud. Oriane peeled the vegetables for the soup and left them in a pot of water, wiped coffee and mud from William and set off with him in her clogs, her clean apron rolled up in a bag.

William hated cold days, the wind slashed painfully at his ears and he yelped, rubbing his palm against the vulnerable holes.

Oriane tried to protect him by tying a shawl of their mother’s around his cap, so that his head bobbed monstrous large in the silver mist. In the unpredictable time between January and March, when dense, icy fog was succeeded by days of startling brightness, the sky as rich as ink, the braziers were lit in the dawn orchards. Some were oil stoves with lids to protect them from the wind, some just little clay pots filled with coals, which glowed orange all along the valley, around the chateau hill and up over the brow at Saintonge. Stumpy figures stood around them, wrapped into mushrooms, with the tips of their noses poking out of their scarves. They could be frightening, Oriane thought, these strange little goblin fires, if their purpose was not so tender. If the blossom was not saved, there would be no fruit, so the men of Castroux, even men like Camille Lesprats who got drunk in Dubois’s and beat his own grandchildren, rose in the dark and coaxed the precious heat from the braziers, watching the newborn flowers until the sun rose as if they believed they could warm the trees by their own human presence.

Madame Nadl, Papie, Laurent and Cathérine were all kind.

William spent each morning at Murblanc, though Oriane feared at first that he would be in the way.

‘Don’t worry,’ Madame Nadl told her, ‘he’s willing enough and it’s company for Papie. They can keep each other out of mischief.’

In the village, she said that it was a shame the way Sophie Aucordier had treated that poor child, he wasn’t really dumb at all, just strange, and his sister kept him very nice, you had to say that for her. William trotted happily about with Papie, watching Laurent at work in the barn, driving the cows into the meadow each morning. They were beautiful cows, the Murblanc animals, seven big Blondes d’Aquitaine with cream-coloured hides and soft pink noses. His favourite was called Alice, and Madame Nadl taught him to milk her, pressing his face against her warm patient flank and smelling the sweet grassy smell of her cud. William waited in the barn, stroking Alice’s ears and singing to her, when the Nadls went in for their lunch, until he saw Oriane coming down the track from the chateau.

They went to Mass every Sunday now. Amélie Lesprats boasted that she was going all the way to Landi to take the School Certificate, and Oriane thought it would have been nice to go to Landi too, but Amélie came to work at the chateau all the same afterwards, and it was still possible to speak good French with Mademoiselle Lafage. She didn’t much mind leaving school, she had never gone there regularly, and Amélie didn’t seem any cleverer for it. Laurent said he didn’t see much point in girls going to school, it only made them ugly like Mademoiselle Lafage, and his own mother had managed quite well without it. Laurent’s sister Cathérine said he was an old stick, and when she had enough money saved

she was going to get a husband in Monguèriac, a man with a shop maybe, and sit behind the counter all day on a stool and never get up to milk an old cow again. Madame Nadl laughed and said how was Cathérine going to persuade this marvellous shopkeeper to marry her if her jam came out stringy and she burned the meat? ‘He will love me for my great beauty,’ replied Cathérine saucily, pushing her bosom out and patting her meagre bun, and they all laughed because Cathérine was as plain as a saucepan, but it wasn’t cruel, because she said so herself.

Cathérine was always laughing, but Laurent was quite stern. Every week after Mass he set off on his motorbike, and no one knew where he went. La Moto, people called him. The machine was blue and black with polished silver pipes and Laurent could mount it quickly, despite his leg, twisting the handlebars into a triangle with his body and then supporting his whole weight on his arms as he started the engine. It looked as though it must have taken a lot of practice.

Oriane asked Cathérine why he hadn’t got married, there’d be plenty of girls who would have him, and Cathérine said he was very serious, he wanted a serious girl, because he’d been in the war. Yves Contier had come home from the war though, and he had got married to Magalie, who wasn’t that old, and they had four children. Bernard Vionne, too, had his boy Marcel. Oriane thought that maybe Laurent was ashamed because of only having one leg and felt very sorry for him. She knew about that, because of their father and William. Laurent was gentle though, and he always came up to Aucordier’s when his own work was over if she asked him for help.

Most homes in Castroux did a big wash twice a year, in April and October. Two or three washerwomen came with a wagon from Landi, and for a week or so the wash-house opposite the nuns’ garden was filled with steam and the scent of wet ash. Poplar wood was best for ashing, as oak and chestnut stained the clothes with tannin. If the wind was not high, the women draped the linens over the big rosemary bushes inside the sheltered walls so they would absorb the scent, and it looked as though it had snowed, with all the shrubs white and bulbous. When Sophie Aucordier was still there, Oriane had gone down to wash with her mother as it was too expensive to pay one of the women. They had hauled the sheets and clothes down the hill in the barrow and pushed them back up again twice a day, soaked and heavy, to dry and air in the breeze of the yard. Sophie said it was the only time the hateful wind ever came in useful. Oriane liked pouring the blue into the vat, it made the sheets and her father’s shirts so white that you had to squint to look at them in the sun, and she was proud to smell the fresh scent of iris root as the wind beat it about the yard, hiding the smells of the chickens and goats.

At the chateau, there was a proper indoor laundry room, and Oriane poured soda instead of blueing into the copper, which Cook said didn’t get the soiling out so well as blue, for all it was more modern, but then perhaps the d’Esceyracs were not so dirty as the people in the village. On Monday, Oriane rubbed the wash with soap, and brushed at any stains, then screwed the fabric into long sausages and left them in two cotton bags submerged in the rinsing vat overnight. Next morning she filled the ash bag at the fireplace and placed it

in the bottom of the copper, which she lined with a fresh sheet. She filled the boiler with three buckets from the well, and when it bubbled she used the long wooden scoop to transfer it to the vat for the first washing. There was a plug at the top of the vat from which the water could run down a funnel to be re-heated in the boiler and scooped back, and that was the most difficult part of the work, plucking it out before her hand was scalded. While she waited for the water, the clothes had to be rubbed against the ridged side of the vat, stooping and kneading until her arms ached and her kidneys stabbed with pain.

When the water ran clear, the wash was ready for bleaching, and then it had to be rinsed three times, hot, cold and cold, transferred between the two tubs with great care so as not to drop it on the sodden stone floor. Oriane worked barefoot, so that no dirt was trodden into the laundry room. Though it was hard and made you breathless, she liked the heat and the steam because afterwards her face felt so clean when she splashed it with the cold fresh rinsing water, though Amélie and Cathérine teased her and said she would grow a red porous nose like Camille Lesprats.

Madame’s things had to be done separately, in the china sink, and they were put to dry in her own linen cupboard, off her dressing room, so that no one should see. The silk underwear was washed with a dilute solution of
Savon de Marseille
, and Oriane poured lavender essence that Cook distilled at the end of August into the rinse. At first Oriane had felt nervous, handling such fine things, but she saw after a while that sometimes they were marked with little spots of blood, or rims of grime, or other things, and though Oriane would never have said so to the other girls, it was comforting
to think that the Marquise was just like everybody else. You learned things, washing. For instance, Monsieur and Madame did not sleep in the same bed like ordinary married people, they had separate rooms, but Oriane knew when Monsieur had visited Madame in the night, and whether he had stayed to breakfast with her, since he took coffee whilst Madame liked her chocolate in the morning.

Oriane sat down to lunch with the others at eleven o’clock. Cook served everybody at the long table in the kitchen, she said there was no point in doing separately for maids and men these days, though Clara had to be sent up with a tray for herself.

‘Herself ’ was the nurse who looked after the Marquise’s baby, little Charles-Louis. He was a lovely little boy, with fat red cheeks, staggering about in the nursery, sucking on a worn yellow bobbin from which he was inseparable. Everyone thought it was a shame for him, his mother leaving him alone so much when he was just two, but no one felt sorry for herself, Mademoiselle Cleret, who was from Paris and gave herself airs. ‘It’s not as if she is a governess, even,’ sniffed Cook. Oriane thought Mademoiselle Cleret must be rather lonely, pushing the baby carriage up and down the lanes all day with no one to talk to.

She went to Mass with Cook and Clara on Sundays, but she barely spoke to them the rest of the week, keeping to the nursery and her little bedroom on the third floor, where she had her own wireless and a big pile of fashion magazines passed on from Madame. Mademoiselle Cleret wasn’t old, but she looked it in her starched navy uniform. It was English style, with stiff white collars that Oriane had to press, all seven, when she ironed on a Wednesday. Perhaps she could be friends with Mademoiselle Lafage, though Oriane

would never dare to suggest it. When Mademoiselle Cleret did speak, it was to tell tales of the d’Esceyracs’ house in Paris, which was in the very best part of town, a place called St-Germain, where there were always parties with the very best people, and she took little Charles-Louis for walks in a park called the Luxembourg gardens with the babies of duchesses. ‘The very best duchesses, no doubt,’ said Cook. Mostly though, Mademoiselle Cleret was stuck with Castroux, where she grumbled about the dust and the heat, or if not that, the mud and the cold, and she made Amélie scrape at the clogged wheels of the baby carriage with a stick.