‘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