I felt better. The pains had gone. I got out of bed, feeling the floor dusty and splintery beneath my feet. I put on T-shirt and jeans. I washed. I did not look behind me. It wasn’t that I was frightened. I just did not want to see what still might be there to see.
I remembered Eugenie, our pretty neighbour when I was a child; when our peculiar family lived in what once had been a vicarage, and she lived in the church; allegedly deconsecrated: but personally I always felt a vengeful God still dwelt therein. She was a wide-eyed, very thin, nervy creature, a weaver of tapestries depicting country scenes. She had her bed in what had once been the minstrels’ gallery, and her weaving frame where once the altar had stood. Plaques remembering dead babies and brass dedications to village benefactors were embedded in the walls. On the anniversaries of their deaths, Eugenie (I expect she was born Joan or some such name) would place little pots of flowers beneath their memorials; more in hope of keeping their spirits quiet and not making a nuisance of themselves, than from any real sentiment, or so it seemed to me, even as a child. Eugenie suffered a series of disasters emotional and financial while living in the church – and of course laid the fault at the building’s door. Even as a child I could see the folly of this – if you live in a damp cold building difficult to heat, you will contract rheumatism: if you engage in a non-profitable profession (and the crafts are simply not well paid) you will run into debt: if you believe all you need is a man to make your life complete, that man will not turn up – or if he does, will stay for a night or so, and briskly depart, before you can lay claim to his soul. And a night or so, what’s more, does not constitute an affair, does not entitle you to talk publicly about your broken heart, as did Eugenie. But she was a good neighbour, and kind to myself and Robin, and would sometimes let us use the bath, installed in what had been the vestry and the only warm place in the church. The window of our Rectory bathroom was broken, and remained so for year after year. Through the hole icy winds blew, in winter, and in the summer wasps would drift in from their nest in the apple tree, a branch of which had thrust itself right into the room, through the open pane. We took very few baths. When I was fifteen I sawed off the branch, went to the glazier, bought some putty and fitted a new pane, thus upsetting my grandmother very much. She ranted and screamed and said I was no flesh of hers. She apologised next day – it was just, I think, that sometimes the sum of the male side of my being was too much for her, its accumulated foreignness. I learned from my grandmother how little people like change, how much they value the problems caused by their own inefficiency. This, of course, was brought home to me, vividly, as the Citronella Jumpers journeyed through France.
Eugenie finally ran out of the church – literally, one Sunday morning – refusing to go back. She left it in a truly terrible state for the next purchaser, an architect, who complained to the Estate Agent and argued that a couple of hundred pounds should come off the asking price. The place was riddled with dry rot, wet rot, deathwatch beetle. Eugenie had neglected it. He wanted her back to prove his point, to thrust his competent knife into rotten beams, crumbling plaster, so she would not have the face to argue.
‘I can’t go back,’ she said. ‘It’s haunted.’
‘Don’t say that,’ said the Estate Agent, ‘or you’ll lose the sale altogether.’
So Eugenie lost the couple of hundred pounds that would have bought her a nice little car: which if she’d had she wouldn’t have been knocked down as a pedestrian on one of the new zebra crossings, would she, and been killed, six months later. The Curse of the Haunted Church! The architect, a shrewd man, as you can tell, made no complaint at all about the ghosts of dead babies, or misfortune dogging his footsteps: his business prospered and clients loved to dine beneath the vaulted beams. Mind you, he’d had proper central heating put in, and spotlights shone against the stonework, and he objected to the Parish Council about the way every now and then villagers would come into his garden to put flowers on the gravestones he kept as conversation pieces and he had the practice stopped. That’s the way to deal with the past! Keep it in its place, or it’ll get you, even if it has to trail you across fields and cities, and make you stumble beneath a bus: your own past or someone else’s. And above all keep the house in order: keep it placated.
Eugenie failed to keep the place in order: so it got her. Reached out and got her. Perhaps it was not my past, but the Hôtel de Ville itself, which so oppressed and haunted me.
So I took Jennifer’s brush and swept down a wall or two, and pinned up some falling wallpaper. I went out into the fields and picked some wild flowers. I put them on the table in the jam jar which had contained the excellent French apricot conserve. But it was not enough. The sense of desolation merely increased. What was it I’d picked up; what was it had fallen in behind me, on my way back from the square to the Hôtel de Ville, down the back road, past the shuttered bungalows with their neat pots of mauve hydrangeas and red geraniums and yellow dahlias, standing smart and orderly like Napoleon’s Grand Army in 1814 before it went off to the slaughter: a summer dream defeated by a Russian winter. The lifelessness of France in summer! The ghosts of dead men under every hedge; bodies swing in memory from every lamppost. The people have forgotten: the land itself has not. It still mourns. My ghostly lover, some young man who can’t forgive death for the denial of his pleasures. Just as my unborn babies will not forgive me. Oh, I could have picked up anything, anyone, along the road.