‘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