“She could never make her husband jealous in life, but maybe flirting a little with the boy would do the trick, now that he was dead.”
Michael Pye, The Drowning Room.
During our absence, the hut has not miraculously transformed itself … there is nothing soft about being back there, apart from the birds which still sing all night long and the violet Alpilles, which hover tantalizingly too far in the distance to help. The canal is a loyal friend in this cursed heat. But despite our bathing misdemeanours, madness lurks.
Homesickness hankers and uncertainty corrodes; every rational attempt to put things into perspective abducted by the stranger I’ve become. Squawking like a loony, picking up the last of our kitchen knives, I slice it through the thick air towards my throat. I know I am out of order, but Loup was not helping, not getting it. Ignoring me. His work means more. When all I want is some validation, some skin touch, hugs and smiles and appreciation from someone else apart from him.
‘And why don’t you have any fucking friends?’ I yell. And then quietly, ‘you know it might have made it a lot easier for me and us if you had introduced me to just one goddamned person, just one or two friends these past six years!’
‘Freya, you know I don’t have any friends, you’ve always known that’
‘That’s not true. You’ve had friends in the past, when I met you, good friends in fact!’
‘Well, you also know that it has always ended badly. You know I don’t trust anyone anymore.’
Loup was right. All of the friendships he had described to me had ended badly. One in murder. The rest, in years of bitter acrimony. I am careful not to pursue the first line of inquiry, although his whole family knows well the murder story. At times this has come between Loup and me, his unwitting witness. The stain of rage which was not his, but which nevertheless chased him into the forest to hide. Hide from friendship and loyalty and the child he was trying to protect. But I cannot ask questions. I have to let this story go, just as Loup has had to.
Our paucity of friendship and absence of sociability is disastrous for us both. It could not be always the fault of others that my husband has no friends. Or could it? And although I do not hanker for the mandatory face pecking and cheek kissing of Loup and his work colleagues, young and older, beautiful and faded, mostly women (he avoids the men), I still flinch at the glaring absence of any lips coming my way. I tell myself that the three-kiss ritual is superficial, and anyway I’d prefer to plant a real hug and embrace a real friend.
But I know I am jealous over this. I know part of my madness is missing skin touch with my close circle. And yeah, I wouldn’t knock back a big bear hug from an Aussie hunk, just to catch up with all Loup’s female face kissing. Moreover, I would have hopped on a plane ten times just to feel the wet unguarded mouths of my new baby grandsons, and offer them in return all of my unguarded tenderness. And I worry and know that six months is too long to be away from a baby who had given me all of his trust, and then I just upped and left. And I dread that he may never again give me all his tender trust. And that is a premonition that finally unhinges me.
So again to the mountains I flee, complete with tent, hiking stove, backpack, boots, and my trusted beech baton. This time I take a folding chair, pillows, two solar lamps, and an esky. Luxuries I can afford now that I am not lugging everything on my back. A bottle of Talisker is wedged between my sleeping bag and thermarest mattress. I return for a second attempt on the peak where Loup and I had failed. And this time I make it.
Wonderland is again exhilarating. Stupidly I run out of water. And daylight. Clambering over the lunarscape in the dark. Pitching my tent by head torch and starlight under the shelter of a pinkish monolith, an uncanny heart-shaped rock leans in a corner as if purposefully placed there. Once again at altitude, I do not sleep, unable to get warm. The next day, finding a residual bank of snow, scraping off the dusting of dirt beside the chamois footprints, I dig down and retrieve fistfuls of transparent white, shoving the slightly salty coldness into my parched mouth. I heat the snow on my stove, desperate for my first cup of tea in 24 hours. Hoping like hell I don’t run out of gas. Snow takes time to boil.
On the way up, I passed by the yellow stripy man and his sunny refuge, and thought for one macabre minute of one of my favourite fiction characters, Gretje Reyniers who rued the fact she could never make her husband jealous. I cast back to Loup’s and my explosive fight on the mountainside. And realise it was the closest my husband has ever come to showing jealousy. A dark cloud of thought: does Loup not introduce me to his friends because he too fears his own inner monster? But I have no desire to play Gretje.
In fact, the beaming girl who serves iced drinks straight out of the cascade, a chatty group of older hikers and a charming younger couple, are more appealing to me than vapid flirting with the mountain-man. Although I do suppress a motherly urge to remove a flake of snot from his nose, and then feel completely exonerated, when he tells me in his sunny, surprising way that ‘C’est incroyable, my wife lives near to you, à Lancon en Provençe!’ Again I am shamed by the obvious fact that there are so many like-minded French people at hand, potential friends: which I have not made.
Wonderland sets the stage for revolt. Two weeks have passed, and I have not gone back to our hut. Scant French conversation with fellow hikers is the food I have craved. Better than pain au chocolat, better than our mechanical sex. So, I stay in the cool of my tent, and Loup comes to visit me on the weekends. And our sex takes on its old intensity; we actually have conversations, discover new things about each other. Laugh. Breathe.
We both know that things had broken down too far. More than the water in our canal, I am calmed by the mystery and camaraderie in the mountains. Despite being alone each day and night, I find it enough to exchange smiles and bonjours and map-sharing along the track. Almost. Homesickness is still a sickness. But up here in these mountains, the air is something to gulp. Sometimes the air is too pure, and I want to throw up. Sometimes the edge up high is too close. Sometimes I fear the vertical drop will not arrest my fall. But it is a fear of being alive, of knowing at last what it is about this place called France that I would miss if it were whisked away.
‘You would have loved it here Pascal’, I call, projecting my small voice out into Wonderland.
‘You should never have left.’