Marguerite resisted, pulling her hand out of Suki’s grip.
‘Please, I would love to see it next time. But Jérôme will wake up and he might be in pain. I have to be there.’
Suki pursed her lips and cocked her head to one side. Then she smiled. ‘Okay then,’ she said. ‘But make sure next time is soon.’
Marguerite was glad to get out of the heat and gloom. In the sullen white light and rain, her stomach uncomfortably full of pastry and tea, she walked home at her briskest pace, almost a jog. The forest on either side of her dripped and crackled like fire.
She could hear Jérôme as soon as she opened the back door, banging repeatedly on his headboard. She dropped her wet jacket and ran through to his room, the stench of shit hitting her before she entered. It was formidable, a wall of smell.
She breathed hard through her mouth as she took him in her arms and raised him up onto his feet. He was wailing quietly, his mouth puckered.
‘Let’s get you to the bathroom.’
‘Where were you?’ he cried as they shuffled towards the door.
‘Getting food from the village.’
‘I don’t understand it, I just woke up and it had happened.’
‘It can happen to anyone.’ She lowered him onto the bidet, removed his pyjama bottoms and was hit afresh by the stench, its unmistakable acrid sweetness. She tried not to look as she folded them roughly, flinging them into the sink. She wiped and cleaned him in the bidet, something he could usually do himself. But he was limp, leaning forwards onto her, his face between her shoulder and neck. His head was very heavy.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said again.
‘Don’t worry. These things happen.’
He was silent, letting her take his full weight. When she had cleaned him, she pushed him back gently so that he leant against the wall.
‘Are you feeling all right? Can you sit like this while I get you clean pyjamas?’
He didn’t answer. He sat there with his mouth drawn down, staring at the floor.
She took away the soiled pyjamas, threw them in the battered, ancient washing machine in the utility room. The smell still hung everywhere. When she went back into the bathroom, he would not look at her.
‘Would you like a bath?’ He nodded slowly. He sat there, naked from the waist down, knees knocked together, hands in his lap as if to cover himself. She wrapped a towel around his shoulders and pulled him up to stand again, very gently, so that he could sit more comfortably on the disintegrating wicker chair in the corner of the room.
‘Strong,’ he whispered.
‘I’m sorry?’
He paused. ‘I said you’re strong, for a girl.’
She smiled. ‘Yes, I suppose.’
She turned the taps on at full force. She fetched vanilla essence from the kitchen and dropped it into the rising water. When the tub was full, she helped him in, folding a towel under his head as he rested back.
‘I’ll be right next door, making dinner. Just call if you need anything.’
He was silent for a moment, but as she left the room he cleared his throat. ‘I suppose the sun is starting to set.’
She stopped. ‘Yes.’
‘It will get dark soon enough.’ He crossed his arms in the water, looked down at his hands. ‘Dark, dark, dark.’
‘Perhaps I could stay for a short while,’ she said, ‘and read some of our book.’
He lifted his chin, pursed his lips and gazed at his toes at the end of the bath. ‘Well, all right. If that’s what you’d like to do.’
That night, in one of her nightmares, she found a small black runt of a kitten with milky eyes; she held it in both hands, wrapped in a blanket. It shivered all over, its little chest bouncing with each heartbeat. She had to find it somewhere to sleep and regain its strength before it was too late, but she couldn’t find anywhere safe for them. There were other cats, strong cats, prowling around the barn they were hiding in.
Then she realised that the blanket was smeared with shit; it was all over the kitten too, its fur slick with it. It had collected in the delicate apertures of its ears and around its muzzle. The kitten opened its tiny mouth wide and Marguerite wiped frantically to stop the faeces seeping in.
Disorientated on waking, it was her sister’s shit-caked trousers she thought of, not Jérôme’s. Until she could wake herself properly and push her memories away, she was cleaning her sister’s small thighs and bottom; it was Cassandre’s hot head hanging dully on her shoulder, Cassandre’s hot arms wrapped around her neck.
She held her pillow to her, squeezing it as tight as she could. ‘Cassandre, Cassandre, Cassandre,’ she said, over and over, an incantation to keep her safe, as she had done so many times in the quiet of the night.
She spent the morning cooking. It was still raining, though it had abated a little. She had no urge to go anywhere. Jérôme had slept particularly badly, calling her down repeatedly to attend to him. The intervals of sleep she snatched felt febrile, and she woke every time he knocked, or every time a nightmare built to its climax, covered in cold sweat. It collected in a pool between her breasts; her back and shoulders were wet to touch.
He had not eaten his breakfast, and had fallen into a deep sleep after she took the untouched tray away. She had a dull and protracted conversation on the phone with the village doctor, going through Jérôme’s repeat prescriptions. When she had finished she went through to the kitchen and prepared a dish she’d learnt as a teenager from their au pair: chicken in a creamy sauce with rice, a sort of English poule au riz. She and Cassandre had always loved it, its delicious blandness. Then she made a tart, the lemons stinging her cuticles where they had grown rough and ragged.
There was a low fog; the rain pattered continually, punctuated by the odd torrent coming down from where it collected in the tiles above. She wondered whether the entire roof was made up of Jérôme’s tiles, since that had been his business. When she’d met his adult son for her interview, in his glistening office in Paris, he had called the family business, which had gone back for generations until Jérôme sold it, a ‘tile empire’. She smiled faintly at the thought of Jérôme as the Tile Emperor. She imagined him standing in a factory amidst piles of tiles, wearing a braided jacket with epaulettes and a gleaming black bicorn on his head. Then she remembered his feeble form in the bath as she’d read to him the night before, and stopped smiling.
She’d opened a bottle of wine to make the sauce, one of five bottles she’d found in one of the cupboards, capped in dust. Now, looking out at the greyness outside, she poured a glass for herself, and the glug the wine made brought her back to some vague memory she couldn’t place, an indefinable levity. She sat in her chair and held the glass to her nose, inhaling the earthy, foresty smell. She tried to imagine for a moment that she was in Paris. The pattering of the rain helped to hide the countryside’s absence of traffic, voices, sirens. She tried to imagine she was sitting alone in a café where no one knew her and she had nowhere to be.
‘What am I doing?’ she muttered, and then felt self-conscious, as if she were acting. A plump robin landed on the window ledge and looked in, its head cocked. I’m here, she thought, not in Paris. There’s nothing there for me. She took a long sip of wine. This is what I wanted.
She woke up to sounds in the garden. She had a headache and a stale taste in her mouth. Quickly, she got up from the armchair she had been curled up in, and as she stood all the blood in her body seemed to rush, pounding, to collect in her right temple. Pressing one cool palm against it, she heard the clinking sounds again, and a male voice. She looked around, still disorientated, and snatched up the wine bottle and glass, putting them away in a cupboard. Then she went to the door, trying to see through the drizzle