When she heard it, the price was astounding, although she could easily afford it. Her knowledge had not kept pace with the property market and she was still thinking in rates of nearly five decades past, when she and her husband bought that vulnerable house on Canigou Avenue, her house with a gaping wound in the wall of its master bedroom. She wondered if the estate agent recognized her name. It seemed more likely that he did not read, and would not like what he read if he opened one of her books.
‘You two ladies will be very safe here. And it’s that kind of neighbourhood, if you know what I mean, where people don’t mind what two ladies do.’
Marie looked at Clare. There was no reason they should correct his misunderstanding. Clare had never imagined herself as anything but feminine, even if feminine at one-and-a-half times life size. But her very size made men — and for all she knew, other women, too — speculate about the alignment of her affections.
‘Yes. The rich don’t care what two ladies get up to. I’m sorry you thought it remarkable,’ Clare said, smiling down on him, and she could tell from his flinch that she had been ungenerous. He was only trying to be cosmopolitan, a man of the world.
Clare expected that her invasion and subsequent move would make news, appearing in the headlines and on the nightly broadcasts, off and on, for several weeks. There were only a small number of national celebrities and she liked to count herself amongst them. The media, she thought, would enjoy gloating over the apparent retreat of a champion of an open society into a fortress of personal security. Reporters would deliver dull updates from outside her new home. Editorials would wonder if she herself kept a gun, suggesting that one should know the business of one’s own house; guns were anti-progressive. Marie might have killed one of the invaders, but there was no way to know. As far as Clare knew, no one had turned up at any hospitals complaining of gunshot wounds that matched the calibre of Marie’s elegant little arm — then again, the police had not been in touch to tell her one way or the other.
In the event, Clare’s move went unnoticed. But if the press ever did come to call, she knew what she would say:
‘My fortress is the envy of the president; he says all old ladies should be so lucky. He speculates that I shall die here. Do you think that’s a veiled threat or an acknowledgement? An admission of guilt? Never mind, the fortress will protect me. I do not keep a gun, though I know how to use one. That is the legacy of frontier life, knowing how to care for and fire a gun, knowing what a gun will do. Have you ever fired a gun? No? Ever held one? No. Oh, someone once had a gun in your house, but he was a guest, a policeman, and unloaded it, and placed it on top of the refrigerator, to put you all at ease while you ate your dinners, as if that would put you at ease. No, that is not the same thing as knowing how to handle a rifle, which I am entirely capable of doing. We had ours hidden in a safe in the floor. My father learned to shoot a gun as a boy. His father, my grandfather, was a farmer who thought it sensible that his sons should know how to protect themselves in the bush. He taught my father and his brother to shoot, and when they grew up into men, they taught my sister and me and my cousins to shoot, frail English girls shouldering guns nearly as long as our own bodies and taking aim at nothing to start with, the usual nothings (tins, bottles, trees), then being encouraged to take aim at more horrible targets. The first thing I killed with a gun was my cousin’s horse, because she could not kill what she had loved. To the men it was just my cousin’s horse, and it was injured — I cannot recall the nature of the injury — and nothing could be done for it, and this, my irresponsible grandfather and uncle and father thought, should be my initiation into killing. It took five shots; I had such bad aim at first. The first two struck nowhere near the head, and I nearly shot off my father’s foot, and the poor horse had to be settled again, and then three more shots until it was dead. They should have let me kill a dog first, because a dog is only a dog, it degrades itself hourly, but a horse is something more than human. It was like killing a god rather than an animal, and I did it badly. What does that do to the mind of a child? Today they would put my father in prison on charges of child abuse or endangerment, but at the time he thought he was instructing me in the ways of our country. He was a man of the law, not of the land. How was he to know the harm he was doing? Of course he should have known.
‘Did my sister kill anything? I cannot remember. She was not inclined to shoot. It is better not to imagine my sister armed. But after witnessing the appalling execution of my cousin’s horse (where was my cousin in all of this? this, too, I have unremembered) my sister put down guns forever and, one might say, bided her time, waiting for the gun to come back, to find her, to answer her rebuke.’
Clare
There is the struggle between what I know — what was reported officially, what was reported to me in the last letter from you, the notebooks you kept before you disappeared completely, Laura — and what I imagine. I feel towards the place where the line between the reported and the imagined must lie. But how do I know when and where my own mind pushes that line in one direction or the other, questioning reported fact as possible imagination, crediting fantasy with the reliability of fact? Can you imagine the force of my desire to know the truth from you, who can no longer tell it or else refuses to do so?
No more demurrals, no more waiting or delay or hesitation over what it is possible to know. This must and can only be my own version of your last days, culled from what you chose to tell me, and from what I can piece together from the official record. There will necessarily be other versions, perhaps more complete, less subjective in their way — versions not so far removed from events as this fractured narrative of longing and lamentation that is all I can muster.
It was quiet at first, a radio to fill the gap in conversation, a woman wailing a country ballad. Bernard glanced at the route on his map, and Sam fell asleep against your arm, his breath coming heavy and warm. You squirmed under the heat of the child’s body, hard and trusting, smelling sulphurous and unwashed, a small insect crawling in his hair.
You checked your watch. It was after three in the morning, and you knew how long it had been since you emerged from the trees, crossed the broken fence and skidded down onto the road. You could not sleep.
When you left the old house a month before, neither one of us can have imagined it would be the last time, the last meeting, the first and only final farewell. I nearly write final failure, because there were so many between us — farewells that were failures, shortcomings that were also, in some abstract way, incremental steps away from each other, so that we were always saying goodbye, and failing to do so in ways that did neither of us justice. I cannot count the number of times I failed, have failed, continue to fail you. Perhaps you alone can make that tally.
It was only in the previous few days, through the strange felicities of chance, as I once wrote, that you threw yourself into what you must have realized was the inevitability of exile. At our final meeting, when we sat in my garden, the shabby cottage garden of the decaying old house on Canigou Avenue (the garden I loved rather than the garden that now intimidates me with its meticulous beauty), my home-grown beets mixing with soured cream and paprika bleeding on a plate, I wore a smug grin at seeing you dishevelled again. You’re allowed to hate me for that, for my smugness, for so much else. Know at least that I never hated you. You said, This is just the first in a new cycle of meetings, and we’ll go on meeting like this, for many years, until one of us dies. It was not much of a beginning for a reunion. It was your decision to meet again. I suppose you were finally able to stomach me, even on my terrible terms, to bear my smugness, my judgement, and my failure to judge, too.