Marguerite picked up her bags and followed.
They drove to the house in silence. When they arrived, Madame Brochon took Marguerite straight inside and through to the old man’s bedroom, allowing her time neither to take in her new surroundings nor unload her luggage from the car. The handover was wordless on his part; Madame Brochon stood by his bed as she spoke, sturdy ankles placed wide apart.
‘Jérôme, this is Marguerite,’ she said.
‘Though most people call me Margo,’ said Marguerite tentatively, unacknowledged.
‘Rossignol may be a grand house but it needn’t faze her; she’ll soon know her way around. I’ve left instructions for where all the important things are kept.’
When he opened his mouth as if to object, she swooped straight in. ‘The last nurse’s notes are all there too so she knows which pills to bring you, and when, and what time you wake and all that. She’s got Doctor Meyer’s details and she knows where I am if she has any questions. I’ve left my number in the kitchen’ – though this was all previously unsaid, all news to Marguerite – ‘and I’ve told her that it’s best to contact me in the morning, early, before Henri and I start out at the farm.’
After the second sentence he had turned to the wall, and started to enact a sort of exercise with his eyelids: drooping them slowly, opening them wide, drooping again, widening them completely and then shutting them tight. The apparently immoveable Madame Brochon twisted her skirt in her fingers, shifted her considerable weight from left leg to right.
When she resumed her speech it was to the accompaniment of his reedy whistle, tuneless and insistent. ‘She should get on fine, there’s everything needed in the pantry for at least the next few days, and I’m sure she’ll not object to the simple things I’ve put there. They may not be anything fancy but I’m sure she’ll find the quality can’t be faulted.’
This last comment was, as throughout her speech, directed at the old man in the bed and not Marguerite. And so as Marguerite watched Madame Brochon, Madame Brochon watched the old man and the old man watched the wall.
Total silence took hold of the place from the moment Madame Brochon left. For the first few days, Marguerite barely exchanged a word with Jérôme, taking his silence as her cue. He didn’t ask her where she was from, about her background or past experience or suitability for the job. The house was some way from the village, down a forest-lined road that seemed to lead nowhere else. It was many days before Marguerite heard a car pass by, and when it receded the silence came rushing back to fill its space.
She started to explore the house slowly, expanding her radius just a little each day. The floor was stone throughout, and she trod carefully – she didn’t like to make much noise. Her own footsteps sounded somehow like an intrusion.
The old man’s room was on the ground floor, not far from the kitchen. At first Marguerite spent most of her time in the kitchen, cleaning out cupboards and sitting in an armchair for perhaps hours at a time, staring out into the garden, waiting for him to summon her. As she started to learn the rhythm of his needs, she could afford to spend time exploring the many other rooms. She cleaned them, one by one, taking time to wipe away the blankets of dust over the sinks, the crisp shells of long-dead daddy-long-legs and centipedes in doorways.
He didn’t sleep well at night, but often during the day. Marguerite, by nature active but prone to sudden, consuming bouts of somnolence, profited from his naps. Her afternoons often passed by in dull and dreamless slumber, from which depths she would emerge only with great mental and physical effort.
She soon learnt to take these long sleeps early, so that the struggle to come back to the world, to her room’s bare walls and sparse furniture, was over in time to face the darkness – when it started to descend – with full strength and clarity. She realised quickly that she was afraid of the nights here, in this house that was never visited by anyone, that it was her charge to protect. The dark was as thick and complete as sleep.
When Jérôme called out or knocked hard on the wooden headboard, sounds that often startled her through the silence, she would go in with a glass of milk or water. At night, he’d stare into the darkness outside the windows before she drew the curtains shut. He might say, ‘Totally black, completely and utterly black,’ as if to himself; or, ‘You wouldn’t be able to see the devil if he were standing right outside,’ tapping his chin with one of his surprisingly beautiful, fine-boned fingers.
On one of those evenings she dropped the tray after placing a glass and small dish of pills by his bed. Its clattering on the stone floor was a shock to the quiet, and he inhaled quickly, gripping the sheets. When the clatter and its echo died he smacked her arm, pushed the glass aside so roughly that it almost fell too, and turned to face the wall.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said and he swiped the air without turning, gesturing for her to leave.
He began to speak more, emerging in bursts from his muteness to chide her for taking too long to respond to his calls, or to demand medication, or ask with suspicion what she would be making for dinner. Madame Brochon’s provisions hadn’t lasted long, and Marguerite took to walking to the village two or three times a week to collect post, fresh milk, medical supplies and – once he had started to talk – the odd request Jérôme might have for something unusual: pistachios, some batteries for his torch, a bag of blackberries.
The route from Rossignol was winding, the quiet road fringed for the most part by forest. Twice, she’d seen a startled deer sprint through the trees. She imagined wild boar and badgers rustling around in the undergrowth too: she knew they must be around here somewhere, since something was digging up great pits on Jérôme’s land. What were they digging for? She wanted to know these things, but there was no one to ask. She was unacquainted with the details of rural life: the names of trees, which birds had which call, whether the large oak at the bottom of the garden was dying. Familiar only with the countryside’s boredom and silence, she was determined in this job to get to know her landscape, to become self-sufficient.
The people of Saint-Sulpice were not rude, but certainly no one was friendly. Just as it was not an ugly village, but by no means picturesque. It was like the last place she had worked: too close to a town to be remote, too far to borrow any of its buzz. With the same disregard for the old and quaint that she had noticed throughout provincial France, dilapidated old buildings – in fact lovely in their faded hues of rust and lemon – had been spruced up with brazen, teak-bright trellises, garish with orange and purple flowers. A café that might, in Paris, have embraced the tattered charm it would have earned after several decades of service, was here the victim of ruthless stripping, whitewashing and primping. It was filled with the ubiquitous red and white checker of country tabletops; a flock of wooden ducks lined up in polite procession along the windowsills.
She didn’t see Madame Brochon on her trips into the village, but there was many a Brochon-like matron. The grande dame of the boulangerie refused, even after Marguerite’s seventh or eighth visit, to register recognition; she pursed her lips when Marguerite ordered her bread, as if tolerating a young child. But Marguerite had learnt in these places that it was a dangerous thing to look for hostility where perhaps there was mere indifference. She knew it was a trick of the lonely to favour the rude to the simply unmoved; that the loneliest thing in these villages and in this most tucked-away of professions was to elicit no response at all.
She visited the library in her third week. Jérôme had asked for a book to be read to him each night. She had just dried him after an evening bath, the time when he was at his most spitting.
‘Can you even read?’ he had hissed after bathtime’s habitual and adamant silence, punctured only by grunts of indignation and occasional discomfort. Her hands were by his ankle; she was trying to guide one bony foot through the gash of a pyjama leg. His feet were growing soft under her auspices. She rubbed them after every bath with oil, sensed the relief this gave him not in any active words of encouragement but in the absence of the contrary.
‘Yes,’