Consolation

  She was laughing.

  ‘Obviously at the time the whole business seemed like the most romantic thing imaginable. The unexpected arrow of some Cupid who had got lost in the fields and all that foolishness, but nowadays, with hindsight, and given the way things turned out . . . Well anyway, I’ve sacked the cherub now.

  ‘It was springtime and I wanted to fall in love. I wanted a man to take me in his arms. I was fed up with being this Superwoman who took forever to take off her boots and had had three children in less than nine months. I wanted someone to kiss me and tell me my skin was soft. Even if it wasn’t true for a second . . .

  ‘So I put on this dress to go with Samuel’s class to visit I can’t remember what with the other teacher’s pupils and . . . I sat next to that teacher during the return trip.’

  Charles gave up on his sketches. Her face was too changeable. Ten minutes ago she was ageless but when she smiled like that, she was in the back of the bus again, and not quite fifteen years old.

  ‘The next day I found an excuse to make him come here, and I raped him.’

  She turned towards Charles: ‘Um . . . he was consenting, actually! Consenting, kind, a bit younger than me, single, a local man, very good at handiwork, very good with kids, very good on birds, trees, stars, and hikes . . . In short, the ideal man. Wrap him up quick so I can take him home and freeze him!

  ‘No . . . I shouldn’t be so cynical. I was in love. I was dying of love and I loved him well. Life had become so much simpler. He moved in. René, who’d known him as a wee lad, gave me his blessing, and Big Dog didn’t eat him, and he took everything on without making a fuss. It was a gorgeous summer and for her second birthday Hattie had a real cake. And it was a fine autumn as well . . . He taught us how to love Nature, how to look at it and understand it, he got us a subscription to La Hulotte – it’s a brillant nature magazine – introduced me to loads of adorable people whom I’d never have known without him . . . He reminded me that I wasn’t yet thirty and that I loved to have fun, and that I liked to have my lie-in . . .

  ‘I’d gone completely daft. Over and over I said, “I’ve found my master! I’ve found my master!”

  ‘The following spring, I decided I wanted a child. It was probably a bit early, but it meant a lot to me. I must have reckoned that it would be a way to strengthen all the ties – to him, to Ellen, to the house . . . I wanted a child of my own to be sure I would never abandon the other three . . . I don’t know if you see what I mean?’

  No. Charles was too jealous to try to unravel all that.

  I loved him well.

  The ‘well’ had bitten him just beneath the crocodile.

  He did not even know what it meant . . .

  And, besides, it went without saying that a country bumpkin teacher would be good with kids and be able to find the Great Bear.

  ‘Sure, I understand,’ he murmured gravely.

  ‘It wasn’t working. Perhaps another woman would have had more patience than I did, but at the end of a year, I went into the big city to undergo a whole series of tests. I’d taken on three kids at once without batting an eyelid – so I ought to be entitled to my own child, no?

  ‘I was so obsessed with my belly that I kind of fucked up on the rest . . .

  ‘He wasn’t sleeping at home every night? He needed peace and quiet to mark his dictations. He no longer wandered around the back roads with us on Sundays looking for boot sales? Well, he must have been fed up with all our junk. He no longer made love quite so tenderly? But that was my fault, too! All that calculating is a real turn-off . . . He found that the children were always in the way? Well, there were three of them . . . And badly behaved? Indeed . . . I thought that Life owed them that much . . . that in their childhood at least they ought to be able to tell the rest of the world where to get off . . . I spoke to them in English too often? Well, yes . . . when I’m tired, I speak the language that comes to me most easily . . .

  ‘For this reason and that one and this one and that one . . . and he had asked for a new posting for the next school year.

  ‘Ah. There was nothing I could say.

  ‘I really hadn’t seen it coming. I thought he was just like me, that the words he’d said and the commitments he’d made even without the judge and his clerk, meant something. Despite the forecast of rough winters, and a rather cumbersome dowry . . .

  ‘They gave him a new posting and I turned into what I was when I told you about my last cigarette . . .

  ‘An abandoned guardian . . .

  ‘I was really miserable, when I think back on it,’ she smiled, sheepishly. ‘But what the hell was I doing here, anyway? Why on earth had I come to balls up my life in a shithole of a house like this, anyway? Acting like I was Karen Blixen among the dunghills . . . Bringing in the wood every night and going to do my shopping farther and farther away so that no one would comment on the number of bottles I placed discreetly between the packets of biscuits and the tins of cat food . . .

  ‘And to add to the entire world collapsing around me there was something even more pernicious: loss of self-esteem. Right, our affair had come to an abrupt end but . . . that happens to a lot of people. The trouble was the three years’ difference in our ages. I didn’t say to myself, he left me because he no longer loves me; I said, he left me because I’m too old.

  ‘Too old to be loved. Too ugly, too much baggage. Too kind, too blind, too far behind.

  ‘Hardly very glamorous, either, with my chainsaw and my chapped lips and red hands and my cooker that weighs six hundred kilos . . .

  ‘No. Hardly very glamorous.

  ‘I didn’t hold it against him for leaving; I understood.

  ‘I would have done exactly the same thing in his shoes.’

  She poured another cup and blew on the lukewarm water for a long time.

  ‘The only good thing to come out of the whole business,’ she scoffed, ‘is that we still have our subscription to La Hulotte! Do you know him, the bloke who puts it together? Pierre Déom?’

  Charles shook his head.

  ‘He’s brilliant. An absolute genius. I doubt whether he’d want to go there, but he deserves his plot of earth at the Panthéon one day, that man . . . But anyway. I was no longer really in the mood to try to tell a hazelnut nibbled by a squirrel from a hazelnut nibbled by a vole . . . Although . . . I must have been interested in all of that or we wouldn’t be here this evening . . .

  ‘The squirrel breaks the nut open into two halves, whereas the vole makes a neat little hole. For further details, see the mantelpiece . . .

  ‘I was more of a vole’s nut in all this business. I was still in one piece, but completely emptied out inside. Uterus, heart, future, confidence, courage, cupboards . . . Everything was empty. I was smoking and drinking deeper and deeper into the night and, since Alice had learned how to read, I could no longer die prematurely, so I suffered from some sort of depression instead . . .

  ‘You asked me earlier on why I have so many animals; well, at that point, I knew why. It was so that I would get up in the morning – feed the cats, open the door for the dogs, take the hay out to the horses and have the children none the wiser. The animals enabled the house to go on living and to keep the children busy, away from me . . .

  ‘The animals reproduced during mating season and the rest of the time all they cared about was eating. It was a glorious example. I didn’t read any more bedtime stories, and I gave the kids these ghostly kisses, but every evening, when I closed the door to the their room, I made sure that each one had his or her appointed kitty as a hot water bottle . . .

  ‘I don’t know how long it would have lasted nor how far it would have gone . . . I was beginning to lose my grip. Wouldn’t they be better off in a real family? With a standard issue mummy and daddy? Wouldn’t I do better to just ditch all this and go back to the States with them? Or even without them?

  ‘Wouldn’t I . . . I wasn’t even talking to Ellen any more, and I kept my eyes down to make sure I never m
et her gaze . . .

  ‘My mother rang one morning. Apparently I had turned thirty years old.

  ‘Oh?

  ‘Already?

  ‘Only?

  ‘I knocked myself senseless with vodka to celebrate.

  ‘I’d fucked up my life. I was willing to do the minimum, three meals a day and take them to school and back, but that was it.

  ‘In the event of a claim, please refer to the judge.

  ‘That was more or less the stew I was in when I met Anouk and she put her hand on my neck . . .’

  Charles was staring at the firedogs.

  ‘And then one day I got a call from the gynaecologist’s office where I’d been examined a few weeks earlier. They couldn’t tell me anything over the phone, I had to go in. I wrote down the appointment date, fully aware that I wouldn’t go. The matter was no longer on the agenda, and probably never would be, ever again.

  ‘But for some reason I did go. To get out, get a different perspective, and because Alice needed some tubes of paint or some other supply that you can’t find anywhere around here.

  ‘The doctor called me in. Analysed my X-rays. My uterus and my tubes had completely atrophied. Tiny, blocked, in no condition to procreate. I would have to do another series of more advanced tests, but he’d read in my file that I’d spent long periods of time in Africa, and he thought I must have caught tuberculosis.

  ‘But . . . I have no recollection of ever being sick, I protested. He was very calm, he must have been the top-ranking officer in the barracks and he was used to having to break unpleasant news to people. He went on for a long time but I wasn’t listening. Some sort of tuberculosis that you don’t even notice and . . . I can’t remember what else . . . My brain as necrotic as all the rest.

  ‘What I do remember is that when I was back out on the street, I touched my belly underneath my jumper. Stroked it, even. I’d completely had it.

  ‘Fortunately time was passing. I had to get a move on if I wanted to stop by the big stationer’s before going to pick up the kids at school. I bought everything for her. Everything she could have possibly dreamed of. Paint, pastels, a box of watercolours, charcoal, paper, brushes of all sizes, a Chinese calligraphy set, beads . . . Everything.

  ‘Then I went into a toy shop and spoiled the other two rotten as well. It was really daft, I had trouble enough making ends meet, but never mind. Life was indisputably a bitch.

  ‘I was very late, nearly had an accident, and arrived outside the gate utterly dishevelled. It was almost night time and I could see them there waiting for me, anxious, all three sitting under the overhang.

  ‘There was no one else in the schoolyard.

  ‘I saw them look up and I saw their smiles. The smiles of children who have just realized that no, they haven’t been forgotten. I threw myself at them and took them in my arms. I laughed and cried and begged their forgiveness and told them I loved them and that we’d never be apart, that we were the strongest and that . . . And that the dogs must be expecting us by now, right?

  ‘They opened their presents, and I began to live again.’

  *

  ‘There,’ she concluded, putting down her cup, ‘you know it all. I don’t know what sort of report you’ll file with whoever sent you on this mission out here, but as far as I’m concerned, I’ve shown you everything.’

  ‘And the other two? Yacine and Nedra? Where did they come from?’

  ‘Oh, Charles,’ she sighed, ‘this makes nearly –’ She reached out and took his wrist, turned it over to consult his watch – ‘nearly seven hours I’ve been talking about myself without interruption. Haven’t you had enough?’

  ‘No. But if you’re tired –’

  ‘Are you completely out of cigarettes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shit. Well . . . Put on another log, then. I’ll be right back.’

  She’d put on a pair of jeans underneath her dress.

  ‘To start to live again, with my dead belly, meant opening my home to other children.

  ‘Such a big house, with so many animals, so many hiding places, so many little sheds . . . And I had so much time on my hands, in the end . . . So I submitted an application to the social services to become a foster carer. My idea was to take children in over the holidays. To give them a fabulous holiday camp, with great memories, and . . . Well, I wasn’t really sure but it seemed to me that our way of life here might be well adapted to that sort of thing . . . We were all in the same boat, and we had to stick together . . . and then I thought that I could make myself useful, after all. I talked to the kids and they must have answered something like, Well, does this mean we’ll have to share our toys, then?

  ‘If that was as traumatic as it could get . . .

  ‘I discovered a new world. Went to get the paperwork at the mother and child care office and filled out every box. My status, my income, my motivations . . . I used a dictionary so I wouldn’t make any spelling mistakes and I added photos of the house. I thought they’d forgotten about me but a few weeks later a social worker got in touch so she could come out and see if I could obtain a consent.’

  She touched her forehead with a laugh.

  ‘I remember, the night before, we washed all the dogs in the yard. I had to admit that they really reeked! And then I plaited the girls’ hair . . . I think I may even have disguised myself as a proper lady . . . We were per-fect!

  ‘The social worker was young and smiling; her co-worker, the nursery nurse was, um, less pleasant. I began by offering to show them round, and we set off with Sam, his sisters, any of the village kids who happened to be hanging about, the dogs, the – no, the llama wasn’t here yet . . . well, anyway, you can imagine the parade.’

  Charles could imagine it well.

  ‘We were as proud as peacocks. It’s the most beautiful house in the world, no? The nursery nurse was spoiling our pleasure asking every three seconds whether this or that wasn’t dangerous. And the stream? It’s not dangerous? And the moat? It’s not dangerous? And the tools? They’re not dangerous?

  ‘And the well? And the rat poison in the stables? And . . . that big dog over there?

  ‘And your bloody thick head? was what I felt like replying. Hasn’t it caused enough damage already?

  ‘But I played fair. Well, my kids have managed fine up to now, was what I said, jokingly.

  ‘After that I invited them into my lovely living room. You haven’t seen it yet but it’s very elegant. I call it my Bloomsbury. It wasn’t Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant who designed the frescoes on the walls and above the fireplace, it’s my lovely Alice . . . The rest is somewhat the same atmosphere as at Charleston. Piles of things, bric-a-brac, paintings . . . At the time of that visit, it was more civilized. Pierre and Ellen’s furniture still had a certain style, and the dogs weren’t allowed to climb onto the chintz sofas . . .

  ‘I’d brought out the heavy ammunition. Silver tea set, embroidered napkins, scones, cream, and jam. The girls did the service and I smoothed my skirt before sitting down. The Queen herself would have been . . . enchanted . . .

  ‘With the young social worker, we hit it off straight away. She asked me some very pertinent questions about my “vision” . . . My ideas regarding child-rearing, my ability to question my own judgment, to adapt to difficult children, my patience, my tolerance level . . . Even with the lack of self-esteem that I mentioned earlier, and which has remained my faithful companion ever since, at that point in time I felt untouchable. It seemed to me that I’d proven my worth . . . That this draughty old house radiated tolerance, and that the children’s joyful cries in the courtyard were proof if ever any was needed . . .

  ‘The other nanny-goat wasn’t listening. She was looking, horrified, at the electric wires, the sockets, the gnawed bone that my eagle eye had missed, the broken windowpane, the spots of damp on the walls . . .

  ‘We were chatting quite calmly when she suddenly let out a cry: a mouse had come to see whether there might be a few crumbs under the
coffee table.

  ‘Holy shit!

  ‘“Oh, this one’s an old friend,” I said, to reassure her, “she’s a member of the family, you know. The children feed her cornflakes every morning . . .”

  ‘It was true, but I could tell she didn’t believe me . . .

  ‘They left at the end of the afternoon and I prayed to the heavens that the bridge wouldn’t collapse under their car. I had forgotten to warn them to park on the other side . . .’

  Charles was smiling. He had a front row seat, and the play was truly excellent.

  ‘I didn’t get the consent. I can’t recall all their blah blah exactly, but roughly it was something to the effect that the electricity wasn’t up to standard. Right, at the time I was annoyed as hell, and then I forgot about it. Was it kids I wanted? Well, all I had to do was look out the window! There were kids everywhere.’

  ‘That’s what Alexis’s wife said,’ retorted Charles.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That you were like the Pied Piper of Hamelin . . . That you lured all the children out of the village . . .’

  ‘To drown them, is that it?’ she asked, annoyed.

  Charles didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Pff . . . She’s a bloody cow, as well . . . How does he manage, your friend, to live with her?

  ‘I told you, he’s not my friend any more.’

  ‘That’s your story then, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is he the reason you came down here?’

  ‘No . . . I came for myself.’

  Kate said nothing.

  ‘My turn will come, I promise. So tell me about Yacine and Nedra, then.’

  ‘Why are you so interested in all this?’

  What could he reply?

  To look at you for as long as possible. Because you are the luminous side of the woman who brought me to you. Because, in her way, she would have become what you are, had she been less mutilated by her childhood.

  ‘Because I’m an architect,’ he replied.

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘I like to understand what keeps things standing.’