Читать книгу Nightingale - Marina Kemp - Страница 11

Henri leant against the fence, watching Cédric as he examined Vanille. At eighteen, Vanille was his oldest cow and the only one to have a name. She had not been able to produce milk for many years, but Henri couldn’t let her go. ‘He loves that old thing more than me,’ Brigitte would often chide, which irritated him because his loyalty to Vanille felt more elemental than sentimental. It might sound ridiculous – he could guess perfectly well what Paul, or indeed anyone, would think if he knew – but she was the last link between the farm he had now and the farm he had inherited when his father retired. The place had done well under her vigil. It had mutated and expanded, a little colony of industry; Vanille and the house itself were the only things that remained the same.

And now she was ill – slothlike, heavy, sad. He looked at Cédric, trying to read his face. Henri had no instinct for sickness.

‘It’s not a blockage this time,’ Cédric said after a while. ‘I can’t find anything up there.’

The men stood in silence for a little while. Henri stepped towards Vanille, resting one hand on her head. She didn’t flinch, looking up at him blankly, her eyeballs marbled pink.

‘Probably just time she went on her way,’ Cédric said. Henri let go of her head, resting his palm under her muzzle for her to smell. ‘She’s what, fifteen by now?’

‘Eighteen.’ Henri looked into his friend’s eyes. They were still their old, deep blue, but Henri noticed his wrinkles now, how deeply they were scored. They had been two of the brightest boys at school; Henri could still remember clearly Cédric going off to Grenoble to study veterinary science, how glamorous that had seemed. ‘It couldn’t be urinary?’

‘Her piss ran normal.’

‘Ah.’

‘How many productive years did you get out of her?’

‘A lot. Ten, perhaps?’

Cédric whistled. ‘You’re lucky to get more than three these days.’ He laid his hand gently on Vanille’s back. ‘She’s done you proud.’

‘My girls are all right. They’re not a bad lot.’ Henri looked at the rest of the herd, grazing calmly, indifferent to the two men.

‘Well,’ Cédric said, packing up his things, ‘I’m afraid I can’t find anything. It might be cancer but let’s call it old age. At this point it’s the same thing really.’

Henri nodded. ‘Nothing we can do?’

‘I wouldn’t say so.’ The vet ran his hand again over the big knuckles of her spine and smiled gently. ‘They won’t get much meat off her.’

‘Oh, I won’t bother with all that.’ Henri stroked one of her ears; she stood there dumbly, not even grazing. He couldn’t send her away to die.

‘Are you staying out here?’ Cédric asked, and Henri nodded. ‘I’ll see myself out. Send my regards to Brigitte. I’ll see you soon.’

They shook hands and Cédric turned and started back towards the farmhouse. Henri watched him go, his figure dark against the pale morning. He turned to Vanille and stroked her muzzle again.

‘You pretty old thing,’ he said. Then he climbed over the gate; he had to get to work.

The air was warming already: it would be hot work today. The cicadas had started, he hadn’t noticed when. It was the same each year, their chorus insinuating its way into the fabric of the days without fuss or ceremony. Once it was there, it was difficult to imagine how silence sounded without it.

Henri turned back as he walked to look at Vanille; she was still watching him. She knew.

‘Good God,’ Jérôme said when she brought his breakfast. She had barely slept in the night, imagining sounds and the sly movement of human shapes against the black shadows of the trees outside her room. Jérôme was already sitting up in bed, a manoeuvre he managed with difficulty alone; unlike her, he appeared to have had an unusually good night, calling only once for pain relief. ‘You look like you’ve spent the night in a cave.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, and he laughed. The sound – a real laugh, not a harsh little bark for effect – was so surprising that she turned from arranging his medication to look at him. He was smiling, his eyes bright, a different creature altogether from the day before.

‘But you have slept well.’

‘Very well,’ he said, tugging at the sheets with a little excitement. ‘Like a baby.’

She watched him as he ate, the grinding cogs of his old jaw as he chewed. Sunlight poured through the window onto the foot of his bed. The wind had blown away the rain; the clouds dotting the sky outside were white and bilious.

‘Today, I’ll go outside,’ he said when he’d finished.

‘Fine,’ she said. She thought with weariness of the effort it would entail. ‘Of course.’

‘It looks like a good day.’

‘It’s pretty sunny,’ she said. ‘It might be a bit cold, but I’ll bring blankets.’

‘And it’ll do me good. As you say.’

‘Yes. We can go after your nap.’

‘Why wait?’ he said brightly. ‘Let’s go now.’

She brought his wheelchair into the room. It was old-fashioned, more like a grand piece of garden furniture than a wheelchair. She could imagine it carrying young wartime convalescents around country houses in England, or frail, wealthy women in resorts in Switzerland. Marguerite was accustomed to sitting patients up in their chairs for eight hours a day, or as long as their skin could take it; it was crucial to prevent pressure sores and the build-up of fluid in immobile chests. But Madame Brochon had dismissed her request for a modern chair – another thing for which she had apparently not been allocated expenses – and Marguerite relied on bed positioning and the armchair in the bedroom to keep Jérôme upright.

When she wheeled it into the room he scowled, his first unpleasant look of the day. ‘I don’t need that thing!’

Marguerite stopped. She felt drunk with exhaustion. ‘How else do I take you out?’

‘You help me walk, it’s no different to taking me to the bath or the lavatory. Take the armchair out instead, I’ll sit in that. I hate this contraption, I don’t need it.’

She lifted him from the bed and they shuffled together through the corridor, the utility room, the kitchen, stopping occasionally so that he could rest against a wall or surface and she could catch her breath. His arm around her neck made her stoop, the long bone of his forearm tight against her throat.

When they got out of the house, he stopped, looking up, breathing hard. The sunshine fell white on his face. They continued to shuffle together, until they reached two particularly old-looking olive trees.

‘Here,’ he said. She lowered him to sit on the edge of a terrace wall while she went back into the house to fetch the armchair in which she often dozed in the kitchen. She set it down between the two trees and lowered him into it, laid blankets over his lap and chest, asked if he needed a hat.

‘I want to feel the sun on my face,’ he said.

Marguerite was warm and breathless from exertion. It was still a little windy; the breeze cooled her skin and rustled the silver leaves of the olives. She laid another blanket over the ground by his chair and sat down.

‘This is where the washing used to hang,’ he said quietly. She looked at him; he looked calm, gazing at nothing.

‘Yes?’

He didn’t respond. She wondered what ghosts he was seeing right now. A woman, his children, his own younger self. Friends, visitors, maybe lovers. Then she let herself think of home for a moment. Frances, their English au pair, hanging washing in the large spare bedroom. Marguerite hanging a towel over the tops of two chairs so that she and Cassandre could sit under their own little roof; Frances singing funny-sounding songs to them in English, ‘Little Miss Muffet’, ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’ with its guttural heft. Marguerite and Cassandre playing escargot on their large balcony, taking care to wash the chalk off the ground before their mother came home. Hopping, marking their own squares with their initials, Marguerite always winning. MD, MD, MD, CD, MD.

She looked at Jérôme and wondered about his own painful memories. A man like him must have reams of them. She thought of the son who had interviewed her for the job: evasive, hasty, a little pleased with himself. That unique combination of infallible politeness and unidentifiable rudeness that she had come to recognise in nearly everyone with a privileged background, a background like her own.

He hadn’t made a secret of his dislike for his father, though he hadn’t openly mentioned it. He’d emphasised that the job wouldn’t be easy, that Jérôme had had many nurses leave and that they needed someone who would stick it out. He’d also emphasised that there would be no one else around, no one at all. Marguerite had wanted the silence then, though she was aware now that she had underestimated it. She’d also needed the money – the salary they were paying more than justified the fact that the job was 24/7, without respite.

And of course, crucially, it was far away from Paris. Her mother and father hadn’t tried to contact her when she’d been nursing in Picardy, but they had known she was there. Now – unless they made a little effort, which she doubted they would do – they’d be gratefully unaware that she was here in the Languedoc, surrounded by miles of rural silence, with a dying old man for company.

‘I have three sons, you know,’ Jérôme said, and Marguerite sat up; she felt eerily as if her thoughts had permeated his.

‘Yes, I know.’

‘I suppose you met the youngest, Jean-Christophe.’

‘Yes.’

‘The lawyer.’ He looked at her. ‘I’ll bet he could barely give you five minutes of his time? It’s a strange way to work, being paid by the minute. I’m not sure it can do anything except make you think your company is too valuable to share around.’

Marguerite nodded. She had often thought this about her own father.

‘And then I have two others. Marc and Thibault. Three sons and me, can you imagine what it was like when we all lived under one roof?’ He smiled wryly. ‘Poor Céline.’

‘Was Céline your wife?’

‘Yes.’

‘The only woman in a house full of boys.’

He shot her a glance, his softness dissolved. ‘Well, I’m sure it was fine. She had nothing to complain about, nothing at all.’ He looked at her again, checking for a response, and Marguerite nodded. ‘I gave her this house – you might not believe it now, but it was very grand. And I gave her everything she could ask for.’

‘I’m sure,’ Marguerite said.

‘Oh, she had nothing to complain about. You get all kinds of women – and men now, too – complaining, complaining, complaining. Giving a woman a great house, giving your kids skis and expensive bicycles and language tuition, that’s not enough. They’ll still find something to complain about.’ He shook his head, frowned. ‘But not Céline. She never complained, not once.’

Marguerite had cooled down a little; she pulled a blanket around her shoulders.

‘Are you warm enough?’ she asked.

Jérôme turned to look at her again. ‘If you ever get married,’ he said, ‘you’ll do well not to listen to any of the crap you pick up in magazines and on television. What men want is a woman with sense and patience. We might think we want the red racing car but we don’t really, not in the long run. We need an engine that will keep us going.’

‘That isn’t a very romantic metaphor.’

‘What do you know about metaphors?’ he snapped. ‘Or romance.’

‘I know plenty about both,’ she said, irritated, but her words sounded foolish as soon as she’d spoken them. A child trying to show her parents that she’s grown up. Jérôme merely grunted.

‘Really. Well, your literature teacher must have been terribly disappointed when you chose to become a carer.’

‘I’m a nurse.’

‘What a difference.’

Marguerite closed her eyes tight, breathed deeply to try to quieten the thudding in her chest. Then she opened them. ‘Was working in a tile shop intellectually demanding?’

Jérôme’s neck bulged as he turned to stare at her. His eyes were wide; an immediate colour had spread across his face. ‘Would you like to repeat that?’

‘No.’

‘I’m asking you to repeat it.’

‘I don’t think you misheard me.’

He blinked. ‘Have you forgotten that you’re working for me?’

‘No, I haven’t.’ She felt the insult of tears forming; she was too exhausted for confrontation. But she couldn’t face backing down. ‘That’s why I don’t think it’s right that you should insult me constantly.’

‘Well! I don’t think it’s right that you should answer back. Don’t forget, just one word from me and you’ll be gone, out of here.’

‘With pleasure,’ she said, very quietly.

‘What did you say?’

She didn’t answer and he watched her, intently, his shoulders up near his ears. She ignored the crawling of an insect on her neck, determined not to look away, and there was total silence between them as they stared. Then a magpie rattled and Jérôme broke his stare, let out a harsh little laugh. ‘You’re funny,’ he said. ‘You know I was just teasing you? You mustn’t let me get under your skin.’

‘I don’t.’

‘I was just having a joke.’

‘Okay.’

He was watching her again, eyes sharp above his smile.

‘And as I’m sure you know, I didn’t “work in a tile shop”. I owned an extremely profitable business.’

Marguerite didn’t reply; she shrugged the blanket from around her shoulders, warm again from the adrenaline. She felt the thud in her chest subside, slowly.

Jérôme laughed again, a laugh that didn’t seem wholly forced.

‘A tile shop,’ he repeated. ‘You’re very funny.’

The milking clusters detached from the cows’ udders and withdrew, clanking and swinging. Henri sanitised the cows’ teats, pink and engorged, thin lines of milk still trickling from them like the white sap from figs. He opened the gate for the cows to move slowly out, lowing and nodding as they walked, and then he called Thierry in from the yard to hose the parlour down. When the young man had taken over, Henri pulled off his thick rubber gloves and rinsed them. He would change out of his milky overalls before he saw to Vanille. He didn’t want to taunt her with the smell of her youth.

Back in the house, he changed into a fresh shirt and jeans and sat in the study to get some paperwork done. It wasn’t urgent, but he needed delay. He went through the accounts for perhaps fifteen minutes until he knew he could no longer put it off. Then he stood up, walked straight out of the house, taking his shotgun, glimpsing Brigitte through the kitchen door and ignoring her as she called out. He strode out to the pasture, where the cows had already settled back into grazing.

Thierry sat with the calves now, feeding them formula, and he looked up and then down at the gun. His head bobbed back slightly, like a tic, and he looked at Henri questioningly, with some alarm, opening his mouth to speak. Henri didn’t acknowledge him.

He held the gun behind his back as he approached Vanille, only now slowing his pace. She blinked.

‘Come on, my beautiful lady,’ he said. ‘Beautiful lady.’ He let her smell his hand, and she rubbed it. ‘Come on,’ he said more loudly, even tersely, so that Thierry might hear. Then he led her away, her awkward, rocking gait making him tread more slowly than he could bear. He needed to do it now, could already feel his resolve slipping. Now Thierry had seen him, he had to go through with it. He couldn’t turn around and wait until tomorrow.

She was docile, infinitely trusting; he got her with ease into the old stable nestled at the corner of the next field. Standing there beside her, he had to wipe tears from his eyes and cheeks.

‘You bloody fool. Get a grip.’

He kissed her head and took it in his hands, turning it so that she was facing out of the doorway, out to the fields. She stared out obediently, not turning even when he loaded the gun. Her cheeks sagged like old elastic; she nodded a little, reflexively. He cocked the gun, took the barrels to her head and pulled the trigger. She dropped in an instant, heavy as concrete. He didn’t look at the ground. A fine mist of warm blood settled over his face.

He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, pressed until it hurt. Then he wiped his face with his sleeves and strode from the pen, passing Thierry as he made for the house.

‘Call the knackerman to come and get rid of that,’ he said, gesturing behind him. He didn’t look at him, or the cows, or down at the blood he imagined must cover his body. He sensed a silent terror around him, suffusing the pre-twilight air. Everything was silent. Even the cicadas stopped suddenly, for just one second.

Brigitte set his dinner in front of him: lamb and potatoes, and a tall glass of water.

‘Busy day?’ she asked, but he didn’t respond. ‘I’ve finished the feed orders for the pigs and chickens. I found a new merchant, we’ll be saving a couple of hundred euros a year.’

‘That’s great,’ Henri said, getting up from the table to get another beer from the fridge. She watched him, glanced down at the bottle in his hand as he opened it. ‘Three beers isn’t very much, Brigitte.’

‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘Good.’ He sat down and took a long draught straight from the bottle. She didn’t like that but he knew she wouldn’t say anything. Ordinarily, she might tease him – ‘farmer by name, farmer by manners’ – but he knew that she knew not to do that tonight. He almost wanted her to try.

They sat in silence for a while as she started to eat. When Brigitte felt uncomfortable, she affected a daintiness as she ate that annoyed him. As if the bald eagerness of her darting fork could be mitigated by the small volume of food she picked up each time; or this rare show of delicacy, the repeated wipes of her napkin to each corner of her lips, make her appear less greedy.

‘How’s Paul’s shoulder?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know, he was in Montpellier today.’

‘Well I do hope he’s seen a physio.’ He could hear the moistness of her chewing. ‘I wonder how Thierry’s mother is.’

‘Why?’

‘Because she’s been ill.’

‘What, with a cold or something.’

‘Not a cold, Henri. She’s had scarlet fever.’

‘Scarlet fever?’ He leant back and let his chair tip backwards, which he knew she hated. ‘What is this, the nineteenth century?’

She frowned; she became embarrassed when he brought up any period of history she couldn’t remember from school. As far as he could tell, that left them with only the most superficial smattering of the Revolution to discuss with any ease.

‘Well that’s what it was,’ she said. ‘Laure says she’s been awfully ill. I did mean to go round there with some things but you know how busy it’s been these last few days.’

‘Why any busier than usual?’

Brigitte put down her fork and let out a little sigh. ‘I’ve been going through all the re-orders, Henri! It’s taken a long time. I’ve done them all, we’re up to date.’

Henri shrugged, took a mouthful of potato and washed it down with beer. He didn’t often drink more than one beer and he felt a little drunk already. He let his chair tip back again.

Brigitte took refuge in her food. ‘I’ll take her something tomorrow if I get a chance.’

‘I’m sure she’s fine. Maybe it’s a good thing; she might have lost a bit of weight at last.’

‘Henri!’ cried Brigitte immediately, and she looked hurt. Now he had a rise, he regretted his callousness. It was too easy.

‘That wasn’t kind,’ he said, trying to smile. ‘I take it back.’

‘I should jolly well think so,’ she said, and he was freshly irritated.

‘But it’s true. She’s grossly overweight.’ He stood up, pushing his plate away.

She stared, eyes wider than usual. ‘Won’t you eat?’ she asked.

‘I’m not hungry.’ Half-drunk bottle in his hand, he crossed the room.

‘Where are you going?’

‘For a drive,’ he said.

‘At this time? Whatever for?’

‘I feel like it.’

‘Henri!’ she cried again, and looked down, her lips pursed tight. ‘All right. Of course. Well, I’ll leave your food out, okay? I’ll wrap it up so Jojo doesn’t eat it. You can have it in a little bit. You must need it.’

‘Maybe.’

He walked to the truck, pushing aside Jojo as she tried to come with him. He could feel great walls of inevitability closing in on every side, almost tangible. He tried to resist for a moment, considered turning back towards the house. But then he imagined the night ahead of him, sitting downstairs until he knew Brigitte was asleep, crawling into their bed next to her slack snores. That was too dismal, and his hunger too deep.

It took twenty minutes to drive to Edgar’s – usually enough time for Henri to question his decision at least three times, but not tonight. As he drove, his third beer and the cool air rushing through the windows made his head light and calm. No more indecision, and no more rage.

He pulled up a little way down the track from Edgar’s cottage. The cottage itself was small, tucked away in woodland, and he was able to leave his truck away from the road. There were no cars in the driveway, no guests. Classical music blasted through the kitchen windows: opera, a man’s thick baritone, infinitely sad. Henri stood for a moment looking up at the sky, a few stars showing through gaps in the clouds. Then he shook his head and walked to the door and knocked.

Edgar smiled when he opened the door, his eyes only half open, lazy, seductive.

‘I’ve been wondering when you’d come,’ he said. He reached out for Henri’s waist; Henri tensed his abdominals under Edgar’s touch. They kissed. ‘Are you going to sit and keep me company for a while, or is this one of your hit and runs?’ he said into Henri’s ear. Henri groaned, pushing Edgar into the house. He felt sick, and aroused, and relieved.

He lay on the sofa while Edgar sat next to his head, running a hand through Henri’s hair. He remembered washing Vanille’s blood from it just a few hours earlier, how sticky it had been.

‘How’s farm life?’ Edgar asked.

‘Fine,’ said Henri. He didn’t want to talk. ‘How’s writing life?’

‘Wonderful. I’m eighty pages in and it’s flying along. But now you’ve shown up I’m naturally bound to get lovesick and stop being able to write anything but sonnets. And the world has enough of those.’

Henri turned his head sharply to remove Edgar’s hand. ‘Can you get me a drink?’

‘All the vices are coming out tonight,’ he said in the smiling voice Henri couldn’t stand. Edgar walked to the kitchen and Henri sat up, flattening his hair down, stroking it firmly into its usual parting. He stared at the coffee table in front of him, covered in books and used cups and glasses. He picked up the book at the top of the pile: Literary Impressionism in Conrad and Ford. He flicked through the pages, but could no longer make much sense of the bald, un-accented striations of English on each page. Nor could he remember what Conrad had written, whether he was English or American. His knowledge had receded like Edgar’s hairline, eroded under the great seasonal tide of the farming year.

But it was books that had first got them talking, ten or eleven or twelve years ago now, at drinks after a christening ceremony in the village. It was shortly after Edgar had moved there, and for the first hour or so Henri avoided this stranger everyone referred to as an ‘eccentric’. ‘Pretentious ass,’ he whispered to Brigitte when they were first introduced. But then over drinks they began talking, Edgar telling him offhand, as if Henri wouldn’t know the first thing about it, that he was attempting a biography of Molière. He had been visibly surprised when Henri reeled off lines of Le Malade imaginaire. They went on to discuss Racine, who’d been Henri’s favourite at school, and it was enlivening to summon his past knowledge, talk to someone who shared it, let their talk meander down unpractised routes. With everyone else, each conversation was simply a replay of the last.

As the afternoon went on – a violently hot afternoon in mid-August, just before a mistral came and swept summer’s intensity away – he felt Edgar’s eyes on him, interested and appraising, and felt himself stand taller, hold his jaw more firmly. He left the party reluctantly, to Brigitte’s bemusement, since he was usually the one to drag them away from social events. And he drove home drunk, tingling throughout his body, excited and fearful and alive.

Now he was sitting before a stack of books on modernist theory, the Molière project abandoned many years since. Edgar placed a bottle of Chablis and two empty glasses on the table.

‘Actually, I should go,’ he said, standing quickly to stop Edgar trying to hold him back.

‘Would it have been different if I’d brought a Sauvignon?’ Edgar asked with a smile, and Henri ignored him. In a drier tone he said, ‘And with that, Hurricane Henri sweeps off to other shores, oblivious to the wreckage he leaves in his wake.’

‘I left the dog in the car,’ he lied, and let Edgar kiss him. Then he left, walking as quickly as possible to the truck.

When he got back to the farm, the house was unlit except for the kitchen. He walked in and saw his uneaten dinner on the side, covered neatly in cling film, with a little note beside it in Brigitte’s young-looking hand: ‘Enjoy yourself!’ He closed his eyes, bowed his head as he leant against the counter. He imagined her writing it, cleaning everything away, thinking before choosing those words. Then walking heavily up to their bed, folding her clothes, moving her large, soft body around their room. Falling asleep alone while her husband ejaculated in someone’s mouth. A man’s mouth.

He couldn’t eat, but he scraped the food into a plastic bag and tucked it towards the bottom of the bin, underneath the rest of the rubbish. Then he walked upstairs slowly, wearily, and crept into the room and lay down beside Brigitte. She wasn’t snoring, had clearly not been asleep.

‘Is everything all right? What time is it?’

‘It’s midnight,’ he said. ‘Everything’s fine, my darling. You can go to sleep.’

‘Did you eat your lamb?’

‘It was delicious,’ he said, as quietly and gently as if talking to a tired child.

She didn’t reach out for him; she never did. After their first abortive attempts at love-making, when they first married – he twisted his face at the memory of her great pink thighs straddling his hips, the fumbling of her hand around his retracted penis – she had barely grumbled or complained about the largely sexless partnership they maintained. There was the odd time, still, perhaps two or three times a year: in the total dark of night, thankfully free from foreplay or words, when he was driven by privation to indiscriminate urgency. But physical intimacy beyond the most purely anatomical was something she had had to learn to do without.

He wanted to turn to her now, stroke her hair or say something kind, but he felt too deadened, too heavy even to reach out his hand. He lay on his back, apart from her, staring into the darkness.

Marguerite turned her bedside lamp on and sat up in bed, blinking. She hugged her knees to her chest and listened. There was a toad’s high rattle like a burglar alarm outside her window; it reminded her of summer childhoods by lakes, where she and Cassandre had been wimps in the face of all the insects and creatures, however hard they’d pretended to be intrepid.

She rested her left cheek on her knees, studying her little room. The broken chair, the empty suitcase under the wardrobe. The tired rug stretched out on the floor.

She had switched the light on to try to escape a constant showreel of memories and images playing in her mind’s eye as she lay trying to sleep – as if the light might force them to scatter, like launching a floodlight on a pack of thieves. But the position she was sitting in now – knees to chest, face on knees, ears pricked, bedside lamp on – was too familiar for forgetting. She had sat exactly like this so many times that it almost felt as familiar to her as sleep.

She closed her eyes, the light glowing pink through her eyelids, and let herself slide back into one of the nights before everything changed. She pictured herself from the outside: a fourteen-year-old sitting up in the pristinely elegant cream bedroom her mother had designed for her. The wallpaper was feathered with very slightly raised, pale green swirls. She wasn’t allowed to pin or tack things onto the wall so she tried to rebel by covering the bedside table with neon-framed photographs of her and her friends on school trips or at birthday parties. Hiding cigarettes behind their backs, so that the innocuous photos held a secret challenge. She used to hang dream-catchers and strings of gaudy beads from the polished bedposts; aged ten, Cassandre had already started to imitate this but she couldn’t quite get it right. With plastic pony charms and hearts, her arrangements looked too young. If only Marguerite had just given her some of her own.

The night their mother first left them was one of those nights: Marguerite was sitting up listening to her parents arguing. She was used to it by then; she spoke to her best friend Adeline about it sometimes in quiet corners at school, drawing her face in and making it sound much more dramatic than it was. ‘I worry for their lives, sometimes,’ she’d say, but that was dazzlingly untrue: her father would never have raised a hand against her mother, nor her mother – tiny and skinny, her meticulously sculpted arms weak – against him. Indeed, their lack of physical contact seemed to constitute a great part of the complaints they routinely filed against each other during the day. At night, on the other hand, specific words were hard to make out through the muffler of the bedroom walls; theirs was an amorphous volley of snarling, parodying, occasional bellowing. It was a tidal swell of rage, it came and went through the night, and Marguerite stayed up to listen, mostly for Cassandre’s sake. Four years younger, she was not yet sophisticated enough to hear the fights without fear and distress.

Inevitably the door handle would swivel slowly and Cassandre would appear with her little helmet of dark hair ruffled from sleep. She’d stand in the doorway until Marguerite beckoned her in. She had a beautiful face before everything changed; surely it was not just through the prism of an older sister’s pride that Marguerite thought that. It was tidy and pointed and neat, her skin a bit darker than Marguerite’s, her lips a very perfect bow.

She’d get under the covers at the foot of Marguerite’s bed and ask her to sing. Until recently, Marguerite had always sung when Cassandre asked. Usually it was a little ditty she had invented, chronicling the adventures of two unlikely friends: a chimp, blundering yet grandiose, and a nightingale. She improvised the words each time, inventing a new adventure for the pair. Cassandre would join in when the chorus came.

But Cassandre hadn’t yet left école primaire, whereas Marguerite was already coming to the end of collège, starting soon at the lycée; she had kissed two boys, she’d smoked cigarettes and tried vodka, she had recently got her period and bought a white bra that she filled carefully with folded tissue. Things were different; she would still defend Cassandre to the death but she no longer sang willingly whenever asked. As a result, Cass had taken to begging, which annoyed Marguerite.

‘The Chimp and the Nightingale, Margo?’ she asked.

‘Not tonight, Cass.’ But because she looked sad, Marguerite added: ‘I’ll sing to you tomorrow. I’ve just had a really long day: double maths in the morning and double Latin in the afternoon, and I have to get up early to finish extra homework from Madame Garcia because she’s a complete bitch.’

‘Poor you,’ said Cassandre. ‘That sounds so stressful.’ She had learnt the word ‘stressful’ from Marguerite, and used it constantly.

‘It is. And Monsieur Clerc’s an imbecile, and the boys in my class are even bigger imbeciles.’ She sighed dramatically. ‘Enjoy primaire while you can.’ Cassandre nodded, wriggling down further under the covers. ‘How’s your homework, Cass? Are you revising hard enough?’

‘I think so.’

‘You’re a little brainbox.’

‘Hmm, I don’t know.’

‘Well, I do. You’re a brilliant little geek. I bet you get the highest marks in your year.’

The toad started rattling again and Marguerite opened her eyes, back in Jérôme’s quiet house. She sat completely still, treasuring the memory but also aware that she was inventing the conversation. She always did this: she let her younger self become her ideal of Cassandre’s older sister. Always guiding, always supportive. Would she really have been so kind that night? She remembered the slamming of doors, her father coming into the room to declare that their mother had left them all. It was the first time she’d done this, and they didn’t know better than to doubt its permanence. She remembered Cassandre crying and her father’s willowy frame disappearing back into the darkness; she remembered holding her little sister and drying her tears, eventually getting her to sleep. But she couldn’t remember whether she’d sung.

‘Please say I sang, please say I sang.’ She closed her eyes and shook her head to banish the thoughts and images. She lay back down, leaving the lamp on, hoping that Jérôme would call her down to tend to him. ‘Please say I sang.’