The Insult (37 page)

They gave me a small, north-facing room on the first floor. It had a single bed; the headboard was plain, varnished wood – no fruit on it, no names. I had a wash-basin, too, and a tall wardrobe that leaned forwards, away from the wall, like a waiter taking orders. Standing at the window I could see the pool below me. There were fir trees at one end, to shelter bathers from the wind. A flight of steps led down to the water. The steps had been cut out of the rock and then reinforced with cement. Beyond the pool was a wooden terrace; this was where the famous people must have strolled in the past, with their silk dressing-gowns and their cigars.

I had more contact with Eva than with Karl and, though she could be remote at times, she couldn’t match his almost total lack
of interest. Five years older than I was, she would sit me down at the kitchen table and question me. For instance, she wanted to know whether I’d fallen out with my family. I said I hadn’t. I told her that my brother Axel and his wife would be living in our house and I thought that, as newly-weds, they ought to have some privacy.

‘Then what’s that on your arm?’ Eva was pointing at the dark-red, wedge-shaped scar that ran in a straight line from the edge of my right hand towards the inside of my elbow.

‘I did it on the stove,’ I said. ‘I tripped and fell against it.’

‘It must’ve hurt.’ Drawing greedily on a cigarette with her pale, plump lips, she seemed to
want
it to have hurt.

I nodded.

It had happened the day I told my father I was leaving. Breakfast was finished and I was clearing the plates away. Axel had already left the room.

‘You’re walking out on us?’ My father’s eyes were pewter-coloured in the gloom of the kitchen and his hands lay on the table, red and swollen at the knuckle.

‘I’m going to live at Karl’s. He needs help with the hotel.’

‘There’s plenty of work around here.’

I shrugged. ‘That Poppel girl can do it.’

‘You’re walking out,’ he said, ‘just like your mother.’

‘I thought she died.’

His head turned slightly to one side, as if he wasn’t sure he’d heard me right. He was looking at me all the time, though, his anger rising, slowly rising. It was like watching milk come to the boil.

But I couldn’t stop myself. ‘She wasn’t my mother, anyway,’ I said. ‘I never even knew the woman.’

Through the window I watched Axel cross the clearing, carrying a struggling guinea fowl by its feet.

I said it again. ‘She wasn’t my mother. Your wife, maybe. But not my –’

I didn’t see the hand coming. I thought for a moment that I must have rushed forwards suddenly and hit my face on something. The
room spun round and I fell against the stove. My right arm touched it first. I felt the flesh melt. I couldn’t tell if I’d screamed or not. There was a kind of echo of a scream, in the walls of the kitchen, somehow, up near the rafters. And the sweet, rotten smell of my own skin burning. Axel came running in. My father was standing over me. I could see the air between his trouser pocket and his hand.

He pushed Axel across the room. ‘Get some butter.’

‘We haven’t got any.’

‘Fat then.’

Axel came towards me with a scoop of white lard in a spoon. He sat on his haunches in front of me and let a whistle through his lips. ‘Nasty wound.’

Which wound? I almost said. The one you did, or the one done by the stove? But I kept silent. I took the spoon from him and melted the fat on to the burn myself.

‘What happened to your mouth?’ he asked.

‘Must’ve hit it when I slipped.’

My father hadn’t spoken at all. From where I was sitting, on the floor, I saw his right boot shift sideways, scrape at a mark made by the lightning years before.

‘Leaving,’ he muttered. ‘Usually it hurts the ones that stay behind.’

If there was any feeling of triumph in moving out, I don’t remember it. My life at the inn – the Hotel Spa, as it was now called – was lonely. Karl was eight years older than I was. He worked all through the day; in the evening he sat in the parlour with a beer. He rarely spoke to me and when he did, his voice had a kind of distance in it, as if I wasn’t family, but a stranger he felt he had to be civil to. Nights were the hardest, thinking Axel’s hand might reach across, wanting it so much, on my shoulder, in my hair, anywhere – and then remembering. I was eighteen and no one touched me any more. I’d get up before dawn and stand by the window, facing north; I’d watch the steam lift from the pool. Most mornings I was sick in the basin. It occurred to me that I might also be carrying Axel’s child. Then he’d
have to marry me as well. I imagined two brides walking up the aisle in the village church.
Do you take this man to be your lawful wedded husband? I do. I do.
I saw my smile in the wardrobe mirror, and it was not a pleasant one. But my blood came halfway through the month, as usual. And anyway, I was losing weight, not gaining it. It got to the point where it didn’t matter whether Karl spoke to me or not. But I only had to think of Axel’s face in the field that morning, his face just before I hit him with the branch, and the anger rose in me until my hands shook so hard that I couldn’t dress. My anger wasn’t unlike my father’s – slow-burning, rarely visible, but almost impossible to put out.

The day before the wedding I left the hotel early, walking along the road that led west out of the village. The leaves were red, and the high, baked grass of summer was beginning to soften with the frost. I passed Miss Poppel’s house. She was the only one of them I had any time for. She lived alone, with three stray cats and a car that had been painted an unusual shade of brown. When she drove down the street, all you could see was its huge, disappointed face and then, dimly, through the windscreen’s milky glass, her spectacles tilted upwards as she peered over the wheel and a headscarf which was actually a pair of old silk stockings. The front of her place was heaped with empty bottles and rusting engine parts the way all the Poppel family’s places were. With her, though, it was character, not squalor. She had chimes made out of door-hinges, each one the size of a man’s hand. She’d strung them together on a piece of wire and hung them from a withered crab-apple tree. They were so heavy, the wind didn’t move them much. But they did clang if a storm got up. I could sometimes hear them through the open window of my room at the hotel.

I crossed the bridge, looking down between the wooden slats at the coating of pale-green scum on the water below. Beyond the bridge, the road ran uphill to the horizon, three kilometres away. I took the first turning on the left, a narrow track of mud and leaf-mould. I passed the plough that had been there for years, half-grown over now.
There was a keen edge to the air that quickened my muscles as I walked, and I forgot for a moment that it was anger I was carrying.

I saw the clearing ahead of me, the dun-coloured walls and black windows I knew so well. Instead of entering the house, I circled it, taking a path that struck off through the bracken-skirted trees just to the east. I parted brambles, then scrambled down a steep bank to the stream. There was the willow. And there, beneath it, was the flat place where we used to lie. I reached inside my coat and pulled out the folded manila envelope I’d taken from the hotel office. I began to strip one of the branches of its yellow leaves. When the envelope was full, I sealed it shut. I sat down on the bank and took out a pencil and wrote AXEL & EILEEN HEKMANN on the front, then I put the pencil away and laid the envelope beside me on the ground. I stared at the water for a long time. It ran as it had always run in the autumn, loud and purposeful, tumbling over the stones. You could sit there pretending that nothing had ever changed.

The next day, after the ceremony, the Poppels held a party at their farm. While I was there, one of the men came up to me. He stuck his thumbs in his belt and gave me a slanting look.

‘How come you’re against the marriage?’

It cost me a great effort to be polite, but it was someone’s wedding day and besides, I weighed it up and I decided that, in the end, politeness would be more insulting.

‘I’m not against it.’ I smiled. ‘Who said I was against it?’

‘I heard something.’

‘Rumours,’ I said.

‘What about the yellow leaves?’ He altered the angle of his head. ‘What was all that about?’

‘In our family they mean something special.’

‘That so?’

‘Didn’t he tell you?’

‘No,’ the Poppel man said, ‘he didn’t tell us.’ One of his brothers or cousins had joined him, wearing a brown suit and chewing on a blade of grass.

‘Well, ask him,’ I said.

‘So you’re not against the marriage?’

I sighed. ‘No.’

‘You fancy a dance?’ said the man in the suit.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Excuse me.’

I walked across the yard to where a boy was pouring home-made beer and I asked him for a glass of it. I could feel their eyes on me, like snails. I was glad I’d sent the leaves – especially as they were yellow, and yellow meant what it did …

I looked across at the two men. I nodded, raised my glass.

Then I drank.

It was a Friday afternoon and I’d been working at the inn for almost exactly a year. I was sitting on the front porch, taking a short break before I started to prepare the evening meal. The warm weather had lasted longer than usual, and the trees were only now beginning to lose their foliage. My father wiped the sweat off his forehead as he walked up the road towards me, his trousers fluttering and flapping round his ankles. He looked like a man who was standing still in a high wind. I rose slowly to my feet. I’d been wondering when he would come.

He stood at the bottom of the steps. ‘Axel took the truck at half-past seven this morning and I haven’t seen him since.’

‘Where was he going? The market?’ There was a market every Friday morning in a town a few kilometres to the north.

‘Yes. But it’s three o’clock now.’

‘Maybe he’s driving around. You know how that wife of his likes to drive around.’

My father shook his head. ‘I told him to be back at midday. There was something he had to help me with.’

I felt my heart begin to churn. ‘You think he broke down?’

My father turned and stared into the trees on the other side of the road, one hand twitching against his leg as if his brain was in that hand and it was thinking.

‘Get Karl,’ he said.

Karl had the use of an old four-seater that belonged to Eva’s parents. The two men climbed in the front, with Karl behind the wheel. I sat in the back. First we drove out to the Poppels’ place. The mother was in the yard, feeding her chickens. She stood below us, one arm circling a bowl of corn meal, the veins and tendons showing through her transparent skin.

‘I ain’t seen nobody all day.’

Karl spun the car round, ran it fast across the ruts and potholes, back on to the road, the springs complaining loudly all the way.

‘I told you we should’ve fixed the truck,’ he muttered.

My father just stared out through the windscreen. I noticed how his shoulders curved under his jacket.

I thought of the time I’d met Axel in the village. I was buying candles for the restaurant. Eva said candles would create atmosphere. That’s what people want, she told me. Atmosphere. It must have been early spring because I could remember what my first words were.

‘I hear the baby’s born.’

‘Yeah.’ He scuffed his boots on the floor. ‘It’s a boy.’

‘I heard that, too.’ I paid Minkels for the candles and moved towards the door. ‘What are you naming it?’

‘Michael. I call him Mazey.’ He grinned quickly.

‘Mazey?’

‘I don’t know why. That’s what I call him, though. It just feels right.’

I nodded. ‘You got a place of your own yet?’

‘We’re getting one.’ He told me there was a small homestead out towards the lake. It didn’t have any water, but he knew where they could dig a well. There was some land that came with it. He might try farming. Sheep, most likely.

I was staring at him, thinking of how I used to lay my head against his shoulder, thinking of the sweet, split-wood smell of him as morning sunlight spilled over the ridge, when suddenly I realised that I was still angry. It was like some huge sea-creature surfacing. It startled me. I’d forgotten it was there.

‘It couldn’t have gone on, you know,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You and me.’ He had dropped his voice down low. ‘We couldn’t have gone on like that.’

‘You don’t have to whisper,’ I said. ‘Minkels is deaf, remember? He won’t hear a thing.’

‘Edie –’

‘I hope the property works out.’ I laughed my father’s laugh, one hollow sound and then nothing, because I already knew what I was going to do. I didn’t know how yet, but I knew what.

I walked out of the shop. I heard the bell jangle above the door as he came after me. I turned to face him. His hair seemed to have darkened at the roots. He stood there.

‘Don’t you remember what I told you in the field?’ I said.

He shook his head, but not because he didn’t remember. He looked out into the street. It was a still, grey day. There was nothing to look at. He shook his head again. Then, with his face lowered, and a smile on it, he turned and walked away. Just for a moment the street was not dust and a stray dog and two parked cars, but grass, the coarse grass of the field, and a path was visible, but only to us, and the stream was at the end of it, over a stile and through a copse, and I was following him down …

‘Which way would he have gone?’ Karl said.

I glanced out of the window. We were at a fork in the road. The town where the market was held lay directly ahead of us, but so did the lake. If we turned left, we had to double back along a road that circled the shore. If we turned right, the road climbed up on to the hills that bordered the lake on its south-east side. My father was looking one way then the other, trying to gauge which was the more likely.

‘We’d better try them both,’ he said eventually.

Karl had been staring at him, waiting for an answer. Now he faced the windscreen again and muttered something that I didn’t hear.

‘Left’s quicker,’ I said, ‘if he was in a hurry.’