‘No. I can work where I like.’
‘So why did you choose here?’
‘Why not here?’
‘Why not Paris?’
‘Because I did,’ she snapped. The words came out too loud and too fast. His eyes widened, his shoulders gathered. He watched her intently and she pretended not to notice his gaze, busying herself by going through the drug chart she’d left at the end of the bed. She made a few notes, put the pen in her pocket, made to leave the room.
‘I won’t ask again,’ he said, as she reached the doorway.
She turned around. ‘You can ask me whatever you want.’
‘Oh, I’m not sure about that.’ He closed his eyes, smiling just a little as she turned back around to leave. ‘Not sure at all about that.’
Henri liked this time of the day the most, when his manual work was largely done and he could afford to slow down a little, to sit on the ground with his back against a fence or wall, feel the scratch of dried grass through his trousers. He could close his eyes and enjoy the thinning of the day’s warmth. His hairline was encrusted with sweat; he could rub it, and bits of dirt, and desiccated grass, and what he imagined to be his own refined body salt would fly as if startled into the still twilight air.
The dirt, all of the dirt, was a source of pleasure to him. Meticulous and clean by instinct, he nonetheless enjoyed the day’s long accumulation of filth before he headed back to the house on weary legs to take his bath. He dragged the pre-bath moment out as long as possible to build up its eventual release; he would stop at the basin in the kitchen and drink almost an entire beer, usually his only beer of the day, in virtually one go.
Then he climbed slowly into the bathtub that was really too small for his long limbs and he crouched there, only then turning on the taps. He watched the water reach the top of his foot, water that was already swirling brown with dried mud. It reached his ankles, it lifted his large, slack penis. When it reached the base of his back, he started to get to work; he scratched out the dirt embedded behind his nails, scrubbed his long back and torso until they were pink. Then he emptied the bath, rinsed it out, and started again – as many times as it took for the water to be quite clear, long past when it ran hot.
This evening’s bath was particularly welcome; today had been hot work. Spring was well underway, the sun swiftly gathering intensity. Henri imagined vaguely the great star’s rotation, its heat slowly spreading over Earth, from the Sahara to the Maghreb, over the sea, soaking through the Mediterranean mile by fish-filled mile, reaching the French coast and moving, an inverted shadow, towards the resilient, winter-bitten land around his farm. He had always envisaged it this way, as long as he could remember.
But the bath held a further charm today: the metallic gurgling of the tap, the clunks and creaks the running water set going through the walls of the house, the lightly hissing hum of the rising water level all worked together to drown out the women’s voices downstairs. This was one of each week’s two or three unannounced visits from Laure, the village boulangère and Brigitte’s confidante. Returning from the fields this evening, he had caught the small woman’s nasal voice just in time to avoid entering the house through the kitchen. That meant no long draught of water, no beer, but it was worth it.
‘Henri’s bath routine,’ he imagined Brigitte saying to Laure in the kitchen below, as she so often did among their friends; ‘Henri’s e-lab-o-rate bath routine.’ She tended to give special emphasis to words over three syllables long. ‘There are families without water in India and Africa and here is our Henri, using enough water each day to fill an aquarium!’
But she also took pride, he knew, in his appearance. When they married, both straight out of school, no one could believe that Handsome Henri – the village’s nomenclature, of course, not his own – had chosen Brigitte Arnoult. Plain Brigitte, big Brigitte, dumb Brigitte. Because that was the other thing: Henri was first in the class, always had been. ‘A way with words and a head for numbers,’ his mother had always said, a regular refrain in the Brochon household as he grew up.
Their courtship and engagement had unfolded quickly. As he leant back in the bath he closed his eyes, imagined his younger self, tall and handsome with his hair combed tidily back, knocking on the Arnoults’ door every evening. Every day was the same: he would bow to enter the house through its diminutive doorframe and greet Brigitte’s parents, sit down and find his bride-to-be sitting nervously in the gloom. He couldn’t imagine now what it was they had found to talk about, sitting each evening in her parents’ warm salon, drinking milk from her father’s cows. Her parents were mistrustful; it was as if he were playing some sly trick.
His own mother had been the first to voice in his presence the question on everyone’s lips: ‘Henri, for God’s sake, why Brigitte?’ He hadn’t felt cross, or slighted; he had understood her consternation. It’s not as if he somehow saw beauty in Brigitte’s scant charms – how could he? When he spoke to the girl her face and neck came out in livid purplish patches, she could not meet his eye. He had not failed to notice the great width of her feet, nor the fair but not insubstantial whiskers around the corners of her lips. But there were things about Brigitte that appealed to him that he couldn’t explain to his mother, who was so tidily and precisely her opposite.
At eighteen, he chose Brigitte because he liked the silence and reverence she reserved for him, she who was otherwise the loudest and most domineering of girls. He liked her simple way of speaking, her literal reading of everything, her lack of coquetry.
With Brigitte he had sensed refuge, a life left unscrutinised and undisclosed. And hearing her flat, loud voice now rise and fall below the din of the pipes and the water, he had to acknowledge that he had that. In spite of the small-minded prurience with which she had grown to view the rest of the world, despite her endlessly repetitive chiding, he still lived in a home devoid of judgment or enquiry.
He heard one of Laure’s whinnying laughs and turned the tap on more fully to drown it out. He leant back against the tub, his legs bent at their extreme right angle in the bath that was too small. He closed his eyes again and rubbed his hands over them, down his cheeks to his mouth; he could taste his salt. Letting his mind drift away from Brigitte, away from Laure, he ran his hands slowly down his body.
Brigitte cracked an egg into a bowl and tilted it to show Laure. ‘Do you see the colour of that yolk?’
‘There’s nothing like your eggs, I always say that.’
‘That is the yellowest yolk you can find.’
‘You’ve considered selling your eggs properly, haven’t you? You’d put the Bernards right out of pocket.’
‘We’ve got enough on our plate with the dairy and the sheep, we just don’t have the scale. Not that you’re wrong, of course. You know I’m not one to brag, Laure, but they really do make the very best omelettes. You can tell from an omelette alone how fresh your eggs are.’ She continued to crack a further three. ‘The secret to a really excellent quiche lorraine is whisking the eggs as long as you can. Whisk them to hell and gone.’
Laure nodded and Brigitte started to whisk with a force she liked to think was almost alarming. ‘So Jérôme’s latest girl was in the shop again today,’ Laure said, ‘buying Lanvier’s usuals. A baguette and a loaf aux céréales to help things get going downstairs …’ She poked her stomach.
‘Laure, you’re disgusting,’ chided Brigitte, though she loved a good bowel joke as much as the next woman. ‘I’m surprised she hasn’t been chased away yet, to be perfectly honest.’
‘Well apparently not. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t last much longer. She doesn’t look like she’s cut out for the job.’
‘Don’t I know