‘Has her environment adapted to her?’
‘Of course not. Why should it?’
Marguerite shook her head. She didn’t have the energy.
‘You think I’m talking about her being a Muslim, but I’m not. I’m talking about her aspirations. She’s lived here, what, twenty years? But she hasn’t accepted anything. She doesn’t accept that she’s married to a boring man, living in a boring house in a boring village, and that ultimately, for all her exoticism, she’s pretty damn boring herself.’ He licked his lips and paused. ‘You may not think I know much, but I do know that people who don’t adjust their expectations cause trouble.’
Marguerite said nothing, and Jérôme smiled again. ‘You, for example,’ he said, his tone gentler, ‘have quashed all your expectations, all your aspirations, and therefore you’re no trouble at all.’
She saw, with some shock, that he wasn’t needling – that he didn’t expect this to offend her at all. But his words caused instant, tangible pain. She felt anger rising up inside her, a rush of it.
‘Thank you for your armchair analysis, but you know absolutely nothing about my life.’
‘I was joking with you, for God’s sake,’ he said.
‘And the only reason behind people thinking that Suki is “trouble” is bigotry.’ He tried to say something, but she interrupted. ‘Of course you don’t adapt to a place if you’re treated like an outsider from beginning to end, and you’re left out of things, whatever you do.’
She was inarticulate in her anger; he swiped the air calmly, dismissing her words. ‘Let me tell you, Marguerite,’ he said, ‘the delusion of centrality and the self-doubt involved in feeling left out translate into one’s behaviour, one’s words, even one’s body language. All of that renders a person sufficiently unattractive to company that they end up actually being left out. It’s circular, it fulfils itself.’
He looked up at the ceiling and licked his lips again, satisfied; she imagined clearly how he would have behaved as the boss of his company, how staggeringly arrogant he must have been before old age started to degrade him.
‘Thank you for the lecture,’ she said, instantly regretting those words. They played themselves back in her mind, immature and empty. He laughed to himself, reaching for a biscuit.
‘Silly girl. I found another weak spot.’
She left the room and walked straight through the kitchen, past the stupid little clusters of flowers she’d been arranging. She kicked the door open, swearing, and stopped outside, hot tears starting in her eyes.
She heard a sound, then, nearby, and sensed the men’s presence before she saw them. Henri Brochon and his farmhands, lugging the trunk of the ailing oak towards the driveway. So it was finally dead. They looked away, embarrassed for her, and she didn’t even try to acknowledge them or gather herself. She walked back into the kitchen with her head down and went straight upstairs to her bedroom, burying her face in the pillow until the humiliation receded, dream and reality becoming fused.
Brigitte had a special way of folding sheets and tablecloths. She’d invented it herself, when she was around fourteen. She didn’t like to teach it, in case someone might show someone else and pass it off as their own. That would annoy her, not because she wanted glory but because she couldn’t stand anything that wasn’t fair.
On the other hand, she had to admit she liked people to see her do it. It was very fast, very effective. She held the two corners at diagonals from each other, and through a series of wrist flicks the entire sheet ended up lying flat, in a diagonal half, on the table in front of her. It could then, with just two further folds, end up as a tidy square of fabric. Fold it once again and it would fit perfectly on a shelf: a slim, flat, unrumpled rectangle.
She felt Laure watching as she applied her method to sheet after white sheet. ‘Amazing how you do that,’ she said.
‘It’s a handy trick.’
She smoothed one, adding it to the tidy pile.
‘So how many double sheets have we got between us?’ asked Laure. ‘Fifteen?’
‘Fifteen white, and a further two or three if I throw in pink and blue too. We could use the coloured sheets for the flower-arranging stall?’
‘That’s an idea.’ Laure wrote down the figures in her book.
‘And an old one for face-painting, because it’ll get stained, however washable those paints claim to be.’ Laure nodded, and Brigitte kept folding.
‘I’m looking forward to the flower-arranging,’ said Laure. ‘I can’t wait to trample over Anne-Marie’s dismal collection again.’
‘Why does she even bother entering? You beat her every year. It’s embarrassing.’
Brigitte was the judge for the fête’s flower-arranging competition, so she didn’t enter – which was just as well, since she suspected she might outdo Laure’s arrangements. Laure’s were very pretty – lavish, abundant, scrupulously tidy – but Brigitte simply had a greater variety to work from. The farm gardens were filled with them.
‘Speaking of embarrassing,’ said Laure, rooting through her sewing basket to find pins for corsages, ‘Madame Lacourse is entering again. You know that, don’t you?’
Brigitte looked quickly at Laure, who didn’t look up, still looking for something in the basket. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I had no idea.’
‘I thought you knew,’ Laure said casually, taking a spool of blue ribbon from the basket and holding it against a band of blue elastic. ‘Not quite the right shade,’ she said quietly, frowning; then she looked up and blinked. ‘Are you bothered? She’ll make a fool of herself, like usual.’
‘Well, I just would have liked to know.’
‘Of course. I presumed you would know.’ She looked very serious, then. ‘Do you mean she didn’t apply to you?’
‘No, she didn’t.’
Now this was something; everyone in the village applied to Brigitte and Laure with their stall ideas – they had to do so by the end of February so that due planning could be done. And everyone knew to write to them both.
‘Oh. That’s odd – she applied to me pretty early. She was one of the first, actually. I presumed she would have written to you too.’
‘Apparently she doesn’t think I’m important enough.’
‘Oh you know it’s not that,’ said Laure. ‘She’s threatened by you, Brigitte, she always has been.’
‘Well,’ said Brigitte. She hadn’t folded the last sheet quite right; she felt distracted. She shook it out and started again. ‘What’s the stall, anyway?’
‘She hasn’t named it yet. As far as I can make out from the description, it’ll be a load of her shabby old knick-knacks from Timbuktu to God knows where.’
Brigitte was stuck. She needed Henri at the fête; she had asked him expressly to leave the farm in Paul’s hands that day, since she needed him to oversee her stalls while she judged the flower-arranging and artichokes, and to help set up in the morning. But still, though she trusted him, she didn’t like the thought of Suki’s stall attracting his attention, or the possibility that it might give them a chance to chat. At least fifteen years had passed since Suki’s obsession, but it still unsettled Brigitte. She hated the woman’s make-up, her painted nails and swaying walk. She hated her cigarettes, her air of sophistication. And while Henri had assured Brigitte that he didn’t find the woman attractive either, she remembered just once or twice witnessing his interest in what Suki had to say. She would ‘drop by’ when