Silent Parts Read online

  The baby was a girl. She lived long enough to be christened. My father-in-law blamed me for that as well. A girl, a dead girl! And look what they were lumbered with: big fat Colombe! I tell you, they hated me and I hated them back. Not Leon. He was just weak, too afraid to stand up to them. I didn’t blame him. They were a brawling lot, the old man ranting and humiliating him, the sisters not speaking. I don’t think I saw his mother smile in twenty-three years. Leon called her the Living Dead. We prayed the old man would drop dead. That was what we had in common, hating his father and one particular bitch of a sister. It was a closed-off, creeping sort of life. You were scared to speak, scared to put your head up.

  Add to this my failed pregnancies. They never got past a few months, not for thirteen years until Joseph. At first the family made sympathetic faces, but it happened so often they lost patience. Then Joseph came along and my mother-in-law took a look and said, ‘I’ll give him a month.’ I said, ‘That’s a Christian thing to say.’ And she said, ‘Just speaking the truth.’ So you see what it was like. Cruelty came out of their mouths without thinking. It was all they knew. But I didn’t think it of my husband. I thought he was better.

  Then our prayers were answered and the old man fell face-down on the road. They said he was dead before he hit the ground. We cleaned him up and laid him out on the kitchen table and everyone wailed and told lies about what a good man he’d been. Naturally I did my share of bawling too, but for joy. You can’t imagine my relief, my absolute glee to see him stretched out there with a rag clamping his jaw shut. I tied it myself, pulled it so tight it creased the flesh, as punishment for all the cruelty that had come out of his mouth when he was alive.

  But if I expected a change for the better, I was mistaken. For a week or two everything seemed fine. Leon shifted the Living Dead out of the best bedroom so we could have it. There were three of us. Joseph was getting big. We needed the space. She went meekly enough, no arguments. It was Leon who caused trouble. No sooner had we jumped into their hard old bed than it became, ‘Don’t you say anything against my parents! You’ve always hated them!’ I couldn’t believe my ears. Suddenly his father was a saint in heaven. Cruel? Never! A loud-mouthed pig? Oh, shame! How could I say such things? I didn’t know proper respect. I was always jealous, always spitting behind people’s backs. No wonder God wouldn’t give us children. Did I want Him to take Joseph away as well? God this, God that. When had he ever cared about God? I howled. You don’t expect your husband to turn on you, not after going through all those hard years together. He was never a man I could be proud of, but we had our laughs. We were two together, then this.

  He teamed up with his eldest sister when she came visiting with her husband. I didn’t know how to look after Joseph. I didn’t dress him properly. I didn’t keep him warm. I shouldn’t feed him so much bread. He would choke. I shouldn’t be lazy. I should make him stewed plums. I shouldn’t carry him. He should walk or he’d always have crooked legs. That was a lie: he didn’t have crooked legs. She said it to rile me. And all the while the Living Dead sat there with a look like she had bad wind. She was thinking: So how does it feel to be queen? I was getting what I deserved. But she couldn’t say it. She had to hold it all in so her son would think she was an angel.

  I put up with it for months thinking he would improve, but no, he was a different man – his father over again. I suppose it was guilt, for having hated him. Not that I cared to make excuses for Leon. He wore the old man’s clothes. He stomped through the house in just the same way. He started speaking like him, barking at everyone. It got so I trembled when he entered the door. I had no one to turn to. Then one day they went off to a cattle fair and I kept Joseph back sick. He wasn’t sick at all. I don’t know what I was thinking. I had nowhere to go. My mother was dead, my father destitute and in the asile. I tried my sister. She’d only just married and didn’t want trouble. She told me to go home. So I went to Marsaults where I’d been happy. They let us stay two nights. But on the second morning Leon came to get us. He was stiff with rage. He took Joseph in his arms and walked on ahead. Whether I came back or not, that was nothing. He had Joseph. Out on the road where people could see us he was all restraint and injured dignity, but I knew what to expect once he got me indoors. He let me have it. No words, no accusations, just whack in the face! The Living Dead intervened. She took my part like a good mother-in-law, so impartial and noble. Still, I was a mess. My nose went this way, my jaw the other. The sisters were appalled. They told me to keep indoors till I looked better. Couldn’t have people talking about us. I was a Jacotot wasn’t I?

  After that I lost my nerve for running. I shut my mouth. If Leon was the image of his father, I was his mother. I think she began to like me. I won’t say we were friends, but towards the end, after her youngest daughter married, we sat together every evening. Our amusement was Joseph, by then the only child in the house. We spoilt him, never told him no, but he didn’t take advantage. My Joseph was placid and accepting. He was frightened of Leon, but every boy is frightened of his father.

  When Joseph was twelve, the old woman died. I never thought I would be sorry. I woke up in the middle of the night and listened to Leon rumbling in his sleep. A man seems very small when he’s asleep. He wasn’t so terrible any more. He was nothing. I thought, I will not lie here slowly dying. I will not let my son grow up to be his father. For a little while I was brave. This time I relied on no one. I waited till Leon was away, and took our savings. I told Joseph we were going visiting, but he knew. He helped me pack the bags. We caught the afternoon train to Rouen. I was thinking Belgium, but we never got that far. I rented a room in Sotteville. No one asked questions. I wasn’t interesting enough, just a widow with a son in tow. I never heard Joseph say he missed his father. His grandmother, yes, but never his father. He didn’t mention him, though I know he lived in fear of him turning up at our door. I got bits and pieces of work, never more than a few months at a time. I trudged five kilometres back and forth to Montigny for the roses, always in winter when the ground was frozen. It was harder than anything I’d done in Caen. Couldn’t get anything in the mills. You had to be born into it. You had to know someone. So eventually we shifted out to Maromme, because Cordiers liked the look of Joseph and wanted a permanent boy rather than a woman. I still did my few weeks in winter. Those last years before the war we were regulars there, digging, lifting, grading. In summer Joseph could bud three hundred a day, more than the boss. I used to look out on the rows after he was gone and think, Joseph created those. I never liked roses, horrible thorny things, but I clung to that view. It was my last trace of him, his handiwork in the fields, his memorial. Long gone now, I imagine. I don’t blame Cordiers for digging them up. They must make use of their land. They had to start again. And they were very fond of him, whatever they ended up thinking of me. Joseph won people over. It was his special gift. You wanted to please him. When mobilisation came they brought me in from Maromme to look after the house, so Joseph wouldn’t worry. It was a godsend. No work, but a roof over my head. Then they opened the factories to women. I went straight into the canvas-works, learnt machine maintenance from little Gabrielle Imbert. I thought I was doing very well for a while – till they wrote me he was dead. I went to Isabelle Bravy and she read it out but I already knew what it said. His officer wrote as well. Your son went quick, he said. I shouldn’t resent him for trying to spare me. But you’ve heard this before. Don’t let me repeat myself.

  I’ll tell you something you don’t know. Where do you think they sent his remains? Not to me, no. To his father in Caen. They buried him in Caen, and shut me out. They didn’t tell me the date. In any case, I couldn’t have gone. Leon would have killed me. I complained to the army. They said they sent all his effects to the address he’d given them. I found out he’d been writing to his father for years. Perhaps visiting him too, for all I know. I was so angry, so hurt. I kept asking: Why did he do it? He had no feeling for his father. T
hey were never close. There must be a reason. At the same time I thought: All those years and Leon never found us – why? Then it came to me. It was Joseph’s way of keeping the peace, his way of protecting me. I don’t know when it began. Not before he came of age. He wouldn’t have gone there while his father still had power over him. But he soothed him, I’m sure. If you knew Joseph you’d understand. My son was a peacemaker.

  nineteen

  The evening rituals don’t change. He watches her scrub the bowls with a coarse rag. Two bowls, two spoons, a saucepan – the extent of their washing up. The kitchen smells of soup and soap, spoiling the scent of roses on the table. He picked these yesterday afternoon but already they have gone limp. She tolerates his roses, though he suspects she would prefer to see outdoor things left where they belong. He knows it’s wrong to dislike her.

  Colombe Adele Jacotot. Not even a Cordier. On the salon walls, as far as he can remember, there are no medals, no prizes, no certificates of merit with mock wax seals for a Mademoiselle Colombe. But this is a carping thought, and he checks himself.

  Finished at the trough, she shakes her hands. Water droplets sizzle in the small fire. Then she reaches down into the cupboard for the playing cards. Out too comes the wine, an old bottle that they have drunk by measure. He supposes she is not so much disciplined as thrifty. It’s a fortnight since she accepted his 200 francs, yet she remains mistress of the alcohol. Always the same cheap wine, always the same limit.

  He’s in no mood for the humiliations of pee-kay, especially as she seems to make up the rules as she goes. Two nights ago it was carte blanche, a previously unmentioned little something worth all the points in the world. He maintained his good humour. He doubts she would tolerate churlishness.

  So they play again. Three games in he has quaffed two glasses and she regards him sternly. Wine, like entertainment, must be made to last. Two glasses and his hands seem to belong to someone else, are clumsy and far away, and the jack of clubs, who has a face like a boy with the mumps, appears to be smirking at him. In this vague and unfocused state he’s slow to realise she’s dealt him a once-in-a-blue-moon hand. Eight clubs, the full complement in the reduced pack, arranged in his fist highest to lowest without any help from him. Pure chance? Not on your nelly! No, there’s something miraculous happening here, or fishy. The mademoiselle is a prodigy on a par with the old Lamberts, except that he can’t recall his mother ever cheating. The idea! But how do you accuse a woman in whose house you are a self-invited guest? And how do you object to a suspiciously perfect hand? Of course she remains impassive, doesn’t even look in his direction. Is he really in need of such a head start? Is he such a miserable match? Well, he won’t cooperate. Point is his for the taking – the greatest number of cards in any one suit. Sequence too – the longest run of consecutive cards. But he won’t have either. Grimly, he exchanges his entire hand for another. She watches calmly. His sacrifice, his defiance, elicits no more than a brief twitch of her lips. Then she returns to her own cards, throws out two, picks up two, and frowns at the new possibilities. It’s then he begins to doubt his grip on events. Maybe she’s innocent after all. Maybe he has thrown away the best luck of his life.

  In the great groaning bed he lies bare-chested and flat on his back, the blankets flung to the floor. He has drunk too much. In an inexplicable departure from her principles of thrift and moderation she opened a second bottle. And now his fingers and toes buzz with energy, or twinkle like far-away stars. With each hot breath his body heaves and the steel mesh beneath him saws and twangs. The air reeks of fermentation and goose down, an unclean but comfortable smell.

  The sounds he hears in the hallway have no human connotation. Little teeth chiselling at the wainscotting. The dance of insect legs. Even the creak of boards doesn’t alert him. So that when he opens his eyes and sees the broad black shape of a woman he’s shocked. ‘I’m sorry,’ he exclaims, under the impression he’s guilty of some terrible transgression. How he knows he’s not dreaming: the bed plunges, screeching under her weight. He wriggles away to make room and then she’s lying there beside him, wheezing with nervousness or simple exertion after having climbed the stairs. Her breasts and stomach are a double hump in the darkness, and in the ensuing silence he feels the rhythmic touch of her nightgown against his arm. He knows he should do something, but can’t think what. A gesture of reassurance perhaps. As the seconds snowball into minutes his panic rises. He’s restrained by awful precedents: a clumsy excursion into Susan Minton’s underskirt, the stoicism of Rough Rene’s daughter. All at once the woman sits up, a featureless pyramid above him. He fears she’s lost patience and decided to go. He reaches out, catching her sleeve then her hand, then burying his face in the woolly weight of her breasts. His heart hammers. Soon he feels her tugging at the buttons of his long johns. A thread of cotton makes matters difficult, until he intervenes and snaps it. His cock is well ahead of him, pushing and demanding out. She grips it decisively and he has a flash thought of ‘Kaiser Bill’ seized by the throat. She lifts her nightdress and as her bulk descends on him he gasps at the smoothness of her skin. She is wet and hot and he marvels that women conceal such secrets. And an old woman!

  She hunches forward, shoulders pressing on his chest. Her breath is ferocious, until she turns away and wheezes into the pillow. No, he’s not dreaming, but nor is he wholly lucid. His body is unfamiliar, an escapee doing as it likes. Coupling. Coition. An engineering marvel, the way it all goes on without direction: their heat and urgency, the heavy rolling of her pelvis and his cock obeying impersonal physical laws.

  It occurs to him they should kiss, and he plants his lips on her sweaty neck, but she is preoccupied with the heat inside. At last she turns and brushes wetly at his mouth. Before he can respond she has plunged back into the pillow and is pushing and rocking with renewed ferocity, which his run-away body, the body that in adulthood he has seldom touched without a sense of weakness and regret, reciprocates. At a certain point he begins to participate, to want and need. He is determined to destroy something, to break or burst or burn up. Oh this sex, he knows what it is now!

  Then in a matter of moments she’s gone. His bed continues to groan sedately. In the darkness he feels light-headed, approving of what he senses inside and out. Whether it is the rhythm of his own breath, he has the sensation of drifting on an undulating sea. Somewhere beneath him there is a strong and determined current, but that isn’t his concern. He can’t conceive of a destination. He stretches out in a luxurious calm. He likes himself better. What has changed? Isn’t the world as separate and unknowable as ever? Yet this no longer matters. He wonders whether this is a common experience. A few minutes with a woman, a few minutes of this strange mutuality, and he’s at ease in his skin. He touches his wet stomach, pattering his fingertips in semen. Her smell is smeared on his body. He reasons that everywhere it must be the same; has always been the same – little spates of recklessness, people breaking out of their closed spheres. How does it work? How can a stranger do this for him? But along with his astonishment and wonder comes regret: how many years has he wasted? This last decade, where has it gone?

  He awakes late, long after she has left for work, and descends to a shimmering spring day: infinite blue sky, birds, wafting scents of roses and hawthorn, croaking frogs. He can’t remain indoors. Taking a towel and a cake of soap, he goes out the back way, steps over the fallen fence and plunges into the rose thicket. Even the broadest path is now a tangle, and several times he’s forced to stoop or drag gingerly at the canes. Then he emerges at the dam and climbs the wall. Choking the verges, the new season’s rushes are as tall as his chest. His boots slurp in the mud, disrupting the chorus of frogs. Eventually he finds a flat stone on which to stand while he undresses. He hangs his shirt, trousers and underwear on the reeds before stepping tentatively into the black water. The mud oozes between his toes, but he’s more concerned about submerged roots and stubble that might cut his tender
feet. Up to his knees it’s cold but bearable. Thigh deep, he starts to breathe hard. A gasp and under! Then he pops up with a splash and an involuntary hoot. Cold! So cold! And he must move or sink. He resorts to an unorthodox sidestroke, a paroxysm of flapping and scissor-kicking that has him alternately rearing up and plunging under. Out in the middle the dragonflies hum and burr along almost geometric flightpaths. They sweep towards his face, veer at the last instant. Soon he feels his heart thudding. The cold is less piercing and he dives, opening his eyes to look up at the sun through the minestrone gloom. He pulls at the water, feels the resistance against his face. Breaking again into the glare of daylight, he realises he hasn’t swum since his youth. Middle-aged men, town worthies, don’t indulge in frivolous pleasures. But he has no nostalgia for those picnics beside the Rushburn reservoir. He feels freer today, freer than at any time he can remember.