It was too cold under the stars . . .
*
Kate carried her dog back into the kitchen and disappeared upstairs after asking Charles if he would light the fire.
He had a moment of panic, but no, he wasn’t that useless . . . He went to fetch the logs beneath the awning, and rinsed out their glasses, and then he too came to rub up against their cast-iron nanny. He knelt down, caressed the dog, touched the enamel, opened all the oven doors and lifted up the two lids.
Each temperature was totally different to the touch.
All the things he was discovering . . .
He went and found the photo she’d been telling him about, and winced.
They were so little.
‘It’s a lovely picture, isn’t it?’ she said over his shoulder.
No. That’s not what he would have said.
‘I didn’t realize they were so young.’
‘Less than eighty kilos,’ she replied.
‘Sorry?’
‘That’s what we weighed at the time. All four of us, on the scales at the bus terminal. Well, anyway . . . Jumping on the thing with all our books and our parkas, and we managed to get told off by the bloke at the ticket office. Madame! Mind your children, please! You’ll bugger up the mechanism with your nonsense!
‘Good.
‘That was precisely my intention.’
She’d pulled over a cane armchair that was missing an armrest. Charles was sitting lower down, his arms round his knees, on a tiny footrest tapestried with rosebuds and moth holes.
They sat in silence for a moment.
‘The awkward old man, that was René, right?’
‘Yes,’ she smiled. ‘Oh, there’s something I’d like to do, just for fun. I’ll take my time. But I’m worried that you’re not sitting comfortably?’
He turned around so that he could lean against the mantel-piece.
For the first time, she sat directly opposite him.
He looked at her face, lit only by the fire he had built and would maintain, and he sketched her in his mind.
Beginning with her eyebrows, that were very straight, and then . . .
So many shadows.
‘Take your time,’ he murmured.
‘It was on the 12th of August. Harriet’s birthday . . . Her first candle. A sad day, or a happy one, it was up to us. We decided to make her a cake and we went looking for those famous fresh eggs. But that was a pretext. I’d already noticed the farm beyond the village during our earlier walks, and I wanted to see it closer up.
‘It was very warm, I remember, and already, beneath the long avenue of oak trees, we felt better . . . Some of the trees were diseased and I thought about all those mushroom genomes that others in my place were probably in the middle of sequencing . . .
‘Samuel, on his little bicycle, was riding ahead of us, counting the trees. Alice was looking for acorns “with holes in them”, and Hattie was asleep in her pushchair.
‘Even with the prospect of that birthday candle, I felt rather down. I couldn’t really see where we were headed. I felt as if I too were afflicted with a sort of scabies or some other parasite . . . Solitudina vulgaris perhaps? The kids were intoxicated with our long walks and the fresh air, and fell asleep very early, and that left me with long evenings to ruminate on my fate. I’d started smoking again, I lied to you earlier on . . . I didn’t read all those novels I’d taken with me . . . But I did read haikus. A little book I’d stolen from Ellen’s night table . . .
‘I turned down the corner on pages that read:
Covered with butterflies
the dead tree
is in bloom!
Or:
Without a care
on my pillow of herbs
I am absent.
‘But the only one that really obsessed me at the time is something I’d read on the door of the toilets, on campus:
Life’s a bitch
and then
you die.
‘Yes, that one had a good ring to it.’
‘And yet you still remember them, the Japanese ones, I mean,’ countered Charles.
‘No particular merit in that. The anthology is in the loo, now,’ she answered with a smile.
‘To continue . . . We crossed the bridge and the children were in a trance. Frogs! Water boatmen! Fireflies! They didn’t know where to begin to look.
‘Samuel dropped his bike on the spot and Alice handed me her sandals. I let them play for a moment while I gathered some rushes and water crowfoot . . . ranunculus aquatilis . . . for her . . . And then Harriet, whom I’d left in her pushchair up on the road, called for us and we went back up with our treasures. And then . . . I don’t know what you thought, yesterday evening when you arrived here with Lucas, but for me, these little walls, and the courtyard, and the little house hidden under the vines and all the buildings round here . . . they’re worn but still so valiant – well, it was love at first sight. We knocked on the door: no one, and because it was so hot we went to have our picnic in one of the barns. Samuel immediately ran to look at the tractors and was fascinated by the old carts. “Are there horses, do you reckon?” The girls made a mess with their biscuits, laughing among all the hens, and I was absolutely desperate that I’d forgotten my camera. This was the first time I’d ever seen them like that . . . Neither older nor younger than their real age . . .
‘A dog came up to us. Some sort of little fox terrier who also liked BN Choco biscuits and who could jump as high as Samuel’s shoulder. His master soon followed. I waited until he’d put his buckets down and rinsed off at the pump before I dared bother him.
‘Because he was looking for his dog he soon saw the four of us and came slowly over to greet us. I scarcely had time to say hello before the kids were bombarding him with questions.
‘“Oh my!” he went, raising his hands, “I can tell you lot are from the city then, ain’t ya!”
‘He told them the dog’s name, Filou, and made him perform all sorts of funny little tricks.
‘A regular little drill sergeant . . .
‘I told him we’d come to buy some eggs. “Ah, I reckon I must have a few in the kitchen now, but the little lad and lass will be wanting to fetch ’em theirsels, won’t they?” and he led us to his henhouse. For a bloke who wasn’t the friendly type I found him very amiable . . .
‘Then we followed him into his kitchen to look for a box for the eggs and I realized he must have been living there on his own for a very long time . . . It was absolutely filthy . . . Not to mention the smell . . . He offered us something to drink and we all sat down round his table with the oilcloth that stuck to our elbows. It was a very weird syrup drink and there were dead flies in the sugar bowl but the children behaved perfectly. I didn’t dare take Hattie out of her pushchair. The floor was as sticky as the rest . . . At one point I couldn’t take it any more and I got up and went to open the window. He watched me without saying a thing, and I think that was the beginning of our friendship, when I turned round and said, “Aah, that’s better now, isn’t it?”
‘He was an old bachelor, all awkward and embarrassed, and he’d never seen children that close up, and I was a future old maid with seventeen years to go, and who wasn’t about to be daunted by a stiff window handle, so he and I smiled at each other in the warm breeze . . .
‘Sam explained that the eggs were so that we could make a birthday cake for his little sister. He looked at Hattie now on my lap: “Is it her birthday today?” I nodded, and he added, “Seems to me I must have a cuddly toy for the little lass round here somewhere.” Oh Lord, I wondered what sort of repulsive sticky thing he was going to put in her hands . . . A pink rabbit he’d won at the shooting range at a county fair in 1912?
‘“Follow me,” he declared, helping Alice down from her chair. He led us into another building and began grumbling in the gloom: “And where the divil have they got to now?”
‘It was the children who found them, and this time there really was no way
I could have kept hold of Hattie . . .’
Charles was becoming an expert on Kate’s particular smiles, but this one was even more contagious than the others.
‘What was it?’
‘Kittens. Four tiny kittens hidden under an old banger of a car . . . The children went wild. They asked him if they could hold them and we all went to play in the grass behind the house.
‘While they were playing with the kittens as if they were marshmallow paste, he and I went to sit down on a bench. He had his dog on his lap, was rolling a cigarette, smiled as he watched the kids and congratulated me: I’d had a lovely litter, myself. I burst into tears. I had had nowhere near enough sleep, and I hadn’t spoken to a kindly adult since . . . Ellen, so I came out with the whole story.
‘He sat there silent for a long time with his lighter under his thumb and then he said, “You’ll see, they’ll be a happy lot, all the same. Well then, which one has she chosen, the little kid?”
‘Her brother and sister decided for her and I promised we’d come to fetch the kitten on the day we left. He walked us back as far as the oak trees. The rack under the pushchair was filled with vegetables from his garden and the children turned round to wave to him for a long time.
‘Once we were back in our little rental kitchen, I realized I had no oven . . . So I planted a candle in a bought sponge cake, and they went to bed exhausted. Sigh of relief, the bloody day was behind us . . . I’d decided it would be a cheerful time, but I’d never have managed it without that house and its beautiful vesperal name . . .
‘I was smoking on the terrace when Sam joined me, dragging his teddy bear behind him. It was the first time he’d come to find me like that. The first time he put his arms around me . . . And this time it wasn’t my cigarette but the stars that served as our smokescreen . . .
‘“You know, we mustn’t take him, the little kitty,” he finally announced, very gravely. “Are you afraid he’ll be sad in Paris?” “No, but I don’t want him to be taken away from his mummy and his brothers and sisters . . .”
‘Oh, Charles, I was an absolute sponge myself, full of tears . . . Everything made me cry, absolutely everything.
‘“But we can go and see it again tomorrow,” he added.
‘Of course we could. And we went back the next day, and the day after that, and finally we spent the rest of our holiday at the farm. The children amused themselves in the barns while I emptied the kitchen out into the courtyard and cleaned it with big buckets of water. Our Monsieur René, with his hens and his cows and the old horse that he boarded, and his little dog and his gigantic mess, had become our new family. For the first time I felt good. Protected. It was as if nothing bad could ever reach us behind those walls, and the rest of the world was out there, beyond the moat . . .
‘The day we were due to leave, we were all rather upset and we promised we’d come back to see him during the holidays at All Saint’s. “Well, you’ll have to see me in town then, ’cause I won’t be here on the farm no more.” No? And why not? He was too old, he didn’t want to go through another winter there on his own. He’d been very sick the year before, and he’d decided to go and live at his sister’s place, now that she’d just been widowed. He was going to rent the house out to some young people and he’d only keep the vegetable garden.
‘“And the animals?” asked the kids, anxious. Bah . . . he’d take the hens and Filou, but as for the others, well . . .
‘In that little “well” there was an echo of the abattoir.
‘Right. Well, we’d go to see him in town, then. We took one last long tour before leaving, and I wasn’t able to take all the crates he’d so kindly filled for me: the car was too small.’
She got up, lifted the left-hand lid, and filled up a kettle.
‘After that the flat seemed really tiny . . . And the pavements . . . And the square . . . And the traffic wardens . . . And the sky . . . And the trees on the Boulevard Raspail . . . And even the Jardin du Luxembourg – I didn’t want to go there any more, the lightning swift donkey rides had become far too much of a luxury . . .
‘Every evening I thought to myself that I’d fill up some boxes and rearrange the flat, and every morning I’d put off the ordeal until the following day. Through a former colleague, the American Chestnut Foundation offered me the job of translating a huge dissertation on chestnut tree diseases. I signed Hattie up at the daycare centre – there, too, I’ll spare you all the administrative hassles, so wretchedly humiliating . . . And while the older children were at school, I struggled with the Phytophthora cambivora and other Endothia parasitica.
‘I hated the work, spent my time staring at the grey sky through the window, and wondered if there were a stove with holes in it for grilling chestnuts in René’s kitchen . . .
‘And then a day came that was darker than all the others . . . Hattie was ill all the time, blowing her nose and coughing and choking at night in her phlegm. It was hell to get an appointment at the doctor’s and the waiting time for a physio to sort her chest was driving me mad. Sam was on the verge of reading on his own already and was bored to death in his first year in primary school, and Alice’s teacher, the same one she’d had the year before, was still requiring the signature of both parents on the little notes she would send home. I couldn’t really reproach her for it but if I were the one who’d chosen such a profession, I’d’ve been a bit more attentive towards this little girl who was already so much better at drawing than all the others . . .
‘What else happened that day? The concierge had got on my case about the pushchair, that it was cluttering up the entrance; I had just got a letter from the building manager with an estimate for all the work to be done on the lift – it was exorbitant and totally unexpected; the boiler was not working; my computer had just crashed and fourteen pages of chestnut trees had disappeared into thin air . . . and, the icing on the cake, when I did finally manage to get an appointment at the physio’s, I found the car had been towed away . . . Anyone else, with a bit more sense, would have simply called a cab, but I burst into tears.
‘I was crying so noisily that the children didn’t even dare tell me that they were hungry.
‘Finally Samuel fixed a bowl of cereal for everyone and . . . the milk was off, it had turned.
‘“Don’t cry over it,” he said, distressed, “we can eat it with yoghurt, you know.”
‘How sweet they were, when I think of it . . .
‘We lay down in our bivouac. I didn’t have the heart to read any stories and we made one up in the dark instead. As was often the case, our daydreams took us back to Les Vesperies . . . How big would the kittens be now? Had René taken them with him? And the little donkey? Were other children bringing him apples after school?
‘“Wait here,” I said.
‘It must have been nine o’clock in the evening, I went to make a phone call and when I came back I stepped on Sammy’s tummy to make him shout. I got back under my duvet with the three of them and said these words very slowly: “If you’d like to, we’ll go and live there forever . . .”
‘Long silence and then he whispered, “But . . . can we take our toys?”
‘We talked a while longer and when they had finally fallen asleep I got back up and started to fill up the cardboard boxes.’
The kettle was whistling.
Kate put a tray down by the fire. The scent of lime flowers.
‘The only thing René had said on the telephone was that the house hadn’t been rented yet. The young people who were supposed to move in thought it was too isolated. Perhaps that should have started me thinking – the fact that locals with young children had decided against living there . . . But I was too excited when I heard what he had to say . . . That winter, much later, I would often think back on that moment. There were some nights when it was so cold . . . But anyway, by then we’d got used to camping and we all settled in the living room around the fireplace. Physically, our first years here were the most exhausting in my life but I
felt . . . invulnerable . . .
‘Then came Big Dog, and then the donkey to thank this little lad who had helped me carry logs every night, and then the cats had more cats, and by then it had become the merry shambles you see today . . . Would you like some honey?’
‘No, thanks. But . . . you’ve lived here alone all these years?’
‘Ah!’ smiled Kate, hiding behind her mug. ‘My love life. I wasn’t sure whether I ought to go into that chapter, to be honest . . .’
‘Of course you’re going to talk about it,’ answered Charles, stirring the embers.
‘Oh really? And why is that?’
‘I need it in order to finish my inventory.’
‘I don’t know if it’s worth it . . .’
‘Well, try.’
‘And what about yours?’
Silence.
‘Right. I see that yet again I’m the one who has to pack the cardboard boxes! Here goes but it’s nothing to be proud of, you know . . .’
She moved closer to the fire, and Charles turned an invisible page.
Her profile, now . . .
‘Hard as they were, those first months flew by. I had so much to do . . . I learned how to fill cracks, and coat surfaces, paint, chop wood, put a drop of bleach in the hens’ water so that they wouldn’t get sick, sand the shutters, kill rats, wage war against draughts, buy the cuts of meat that were reduced and divide them up before freezing them, and do a ton of things I would never have thought myself capable of and, all the time, there’d be a very curious little girl under my feet . . .
‘In those days I went to bed at the same time as the children. After eight in the evening I could have had a sign saying “out of order”. It was the best thing that could have happened to me, actually . . . I never regretted my decision. Nowadays it’s more complicated because of school and in future it will be even worse, but nine years ago, believe me, this Robinson Crusoe lifestyle saved us all. And then the good weather returned . . . The house was almost comfortable and I began to look in the mirror again to brush my hair. It’s daft but it was something I hadn’t done in almost a year . . .
‘One morning I put on a dress again, and the next day I fell in love.’