She whispered the words ‘fuck you’ as she left the room. She walked straight through the kitchen and out into the garden. Now she spoke aloud. ‘Fuck you.’ She inhaled deeply, stretched her arms above her head, felt her abdomen pulled from pelvis to ribs. ‘Fuck off and die already,’ she said, and was surprised to be overcome suddenly with laughter. She bent over to enjoy the sensation, resting her hands on her knees. She felt her hair falling around her face as she laughed. Then she straightened up and rubbed away tears from her eyes.
‘I wonder what you’ll think, Henri, when you see him. He’s gone rapidly downhill.’ Brigitte shook her head as she spoke. ‘It’s very sad.’
‘I wasn’t thinking I’d go into the house.’
‘Weren’t you? No, I suppose not.’
‘I haven’t been in for some time.’
‘No, not since – well, I don’t know when. Didn’t you have to fix his bed that time a few months ago?’
‘No, we sent Thierry to do it.’
‘That’s right.’ They had almost reached the village; Brigitte leant forward in her seat to inspect everything. ‘That roundabout is getting grubbier by the day.’
‘Hm,’ said Henri.
‘It’s really a disgrace, actually. I know the weather’s only just warming up, but there’s no excuse not to have something planted there. Remember when I planted those hydrangeas in the middle?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Well, those lasted a while at least. But I can’t be expected to come to the rescue every time something in the village needs fixing … Huh, what a surprise – I can see Fred in the Tabac, already on his second beer of the day, no doubt.’ She sniffed, was silent for a moment. ‘Laure was saying this new nurse was seen talking to Suki Lacourse,’ she said as they passed the Lacourses’ house, and she eyed Henri carefully.
‘Is that right?’ He checked the rear-view mirror, indicated to turn right out of the village.
‘Well, apparently so. I wonder what someone like that thinks she’s doing chatting up some young little nurse.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Look at the state of that tarmac,’ she said, peering out at the battered road leading to Rossignol. ‘Well, it seems odd to me. Since she thinks she’s such an intellectual.’
‘Perhaps the nurse is an intellectual too,’ he joked lightly; Brigitte snorted.
‘I should think not! She hardly seemed capable of stringing two sentences together.’
‘Oh dear. Not great company for Jérôme.’
Brigitte was silent for a moment. ‘Mind you, you don’t have to be an intellectual to be intelligent.’
‘No,’ said Henri, and he laid his hand over hers. ‘Of course you don’t.’
Henri pulled the truck into Jérôme’s driveway. Rossignol was tired: the once-proud arch stretching high above the gates was covered in rust, the grey paint it used to wear peeling in small patches like sunburnt skin.
‘Wait here for a moment,’ said Brigitte. ‘I’ll just check they’re both around and awake. If I don’t come out in a few minutes, you can presume they are, of course. And pick me up on your way home?’
Henri turned in the driveway and stopped by the tall cypress tree in its centre. It had always been there, as far as he knew. As a boy and young man he had come here often to play with Jérôme’s sons: Marc, Thibault, little Jean-Christophe with his ears like large mushrooms. Henri and his friends would race here from the village on bikes, small stones and flint spraying under their wheels.
He remembered going on expeditions with Thibault, his classmate; they would tie bandanas around their foreheads and take large, pronged skewers into the wild forest around the Lanviers’ land. ‘We’re hunting boar!’ they’d shout to Thibault’s brothers, refusing to take Jean-Christophe with them despite his pleading. ‘You’re not big enough yet JC. They might kill you.’
Rossignol had been larger, and grander, and more remote than anyone else’s house. When they were teenagers, the surrounding forest was a good place to smoke cigarettes and weed, and get drunk. There was a pool in the garden, long since out of use, into which they’d jump from what felt like lethal distances, hurling themselves in at their most acrobatic angles and dunking each other a little too long.
Yet always hanging over this idyll was the shadow of Jérôme. His sons were terrified of him, even the impossibly grown-up-seeming Marc, whom the whole village seemed to worship. Henri remembered Jérôme coming out to the pool sometimes, in his Speedos, and all the boys falling silent.
‘A race?’ he’d challenge them. ‘Who’s man enough for that?’
He’d smile, look around, accept his reluctant contestants. Though not tall, he seemed to the young boys preternaturally strong and fit. And he was, indeed, a faster swimmer – by a breath – than Henri, who was the fastest of them all.
He liked Henri; Henri sensed he approved of him. And so Henri, feeling a little disloyal, liked him back.
‘My father’s a fucking cunt,’ Thibault said once, kicking a wall, fists curled tight by his side and tears in his eyes. Henri felt he could neither agree nor disagree, and said something non-committal; perhaps ‘all parents are’. But Thibault had insisted: ‘No, you have no idea. My dad’s a proper cunt.’ Then he’d stared accusingly at Henri. ‘You don’t think so because he likes you. You’re exactly what he wishes I was.’ And Henri had had to lie.
Brigitte hadn’t come out. Henri turned on the engine and made to drive the truck back out onto the road, but he stopped at the sight of a figure standing by the gateway, squinting at him. It was the new nurse, he realised, though he had thought her a teenage boy at first glance. She was younger than he’d imagined, standing long-limbed and straight in plain, even scruffy clothes, her eyes narrowed as she stared at him in the bright sunshine.
He started to wind down the window to introduce himself, but she was already walking swiftly towards the house, keeping a distance from his truck. As she turned the corner of the house to get to the back door, she was the eerie vision of a teenage Thibault.
She stood for some time inspecting all the pastries behind the glass. There were glossy chocolate and coffee éclairs, vile-coloured marzipan pigs and frogs that she and her sister used to long for as children. The millefeuilles were impressive, delicately layered and squidgy. There were dark jam tarts, criss-crossed with glistening strands of pastry. It all made her feel a little sick.
She pointed at a pile of fougasses.
‘Are they plain?’ she asked the young woman at the till.
‘Yes.’
‘No, Julie,’ interjected the main boulangère, tutting as she looked up from her magazine. She had been reading it standing up, leaning forward onto the counter. Like a hen, thought Marguerite, with her small head, short cropped hair and unusually wide hips. And she blinked a lot, and stared, and jerked her little face just like a chicken. ‘That’s the garlic and rosemary.’
She watched Marguerite as she paid. Marguerite could feel her small bright eyes on her back as she left, pulling up the hood of her cagoule against the rain.
She thought vaguely of going to sit in the library, for something to do, and realised that she was startlingly