Marina Kemp - Nightingale

‘There’s a lamp I can’t work – here,’ she said, leading him to the standing lamp in the corner of the kitchen, by the chair she’d been sleeping in just a few minutes earlier. She eyed the rumpled blanket and indented cushions, hoping he wouldn’t notice. ‘I’ve changed the bulb, but I think the whole thing might be broken.’

He nodded. ‘Anything else?’

‘Well, I can only get two of the gas rings to work on the cooker.’

She didn’t want to tell him the other things now; they seemed insignificant and intimate. A broken chair in her bedroom that she didn’t need to sit on anyway; the wardrobe door that had come off its hinges and that she had just left resting against the wall instead.

‘Let me have a look at these then.’ He walked out of the kitchen, into the house, and she scanned the surfaces quickly, wondering how it looked. He came back with a toolbox she hadn’t known existed. He didn’t look at her but got straight to work on the gas rings and she waited there, unsure what to do. She couldn’t leave the kitchen, she couldn’t just sit there doing nothing. She switched the kettle on: an old, yellowed electric kettle like the one her au pair had brought from England.

‘Would you like coffee?’ she asked to his back.

‘I’m fine, thank you,’ he said, turning only briefly to speak. He bent over the cooker, fiddling with something. He was tall, his shoulders broad; the kitchen felt very small then. She turned and opened a cupboard, rearranging things that didn’t need arranging. The kettle’s foolish crackling and rumbling started to rise steadily towards boiling, the sound dominating the room. Henri removed his jacket, turning to hang it carefully over a chair. His sweater was also green, green like his eyes and his socks. She wondered if he matched them intentionally.

Finally, the kettle clicked and steam rose. She made a cup of tea she didn’t want.

‘I’ll be right back,’ she said, and left the room. She didn’t look in on Jérôme; if he was awake, she didn’t want to have to explain that there was someone in the house. She went to go upstairs but realised Henri might have to come and find her when he had finished, so instead she sat at the bottom of the stairs and blew into the cup. Steam met her face; she closed her eyes.

It was always strange to be back in the house; practically nothing had changed. Henri could remember countless breakfasts at this kitchen table, when he had stayed the night as a young boy. Madame Lanvier made elaborate breakfasts for her household of males, and she gave the boys coffee. Henri hadn’t liked the taste but had drunk it nonetheless because it made him feel mature. He would never have been allowed coffee at home, not at that age.

The kitchen was just as tidy now as it had always been under Madame Lanvier’s constant domestic surveillance. He couldn’t remember her without picturing her wiping surfaces or washing things. When he was very young, he had watched her hang the family’s washing on three lines in the olive groves. He remembered standing against the warm stones of the house, watching her bend heavily to take white sheets from the basket, standing to hang them, very slowly, smoothly, even rhythmically. When she had gone back to the house, he had run over and hidden between the walls of hanging sheets. He’d stood there in a cool, dazzlingly fragrant tunnel of white, until he heard Thibault calling him to some game or other.

His own home had been very dull by comparison. Without siblings, each room was his to enter; there was no friction, no chaos. His mother, adoring, intuitive, had few reprimands for the son she admired without reservation. His father, the best farmer for miles, was a largely silent presence. When Henri wasn’t studying, his father taught him, often wordlessly, how to set the cows up for milking, how to nurse suckling runts, how to lop the heads off chickens. The sound of animals and machinery, but little else, had suffused their home. How exotic, then, had Rossignol seemed: the three brothers always fighting or laughing, the great quantities of food consumed, the crude jokes, farts and burps. The chaos would be punctuated and compounded by Jérôme’s high-octane outbursts, his fist slamming against the table and doors banging closed after him. Amidst all this Céline Lanvier moved calmly with her slow, gentle force.

He put his tools down and tried the gas ring he’d just fixed; it hissed briefly and then burst into controlled blue flame. A beautiful, electric blue. He turned the gas off and took his tools over to the lamp to rewire the plug, a quick and easy job that most women he knew would have managed with ease.

When he was finished, he put the tools away and the nurse appeared, as if she had been waiting just outside.

‘It’s all done,’ he said, putting on his jacket and boots.

‘Thank you.’

‘Do let Brigitte know if anything else comes up. It’s our job to keep the place going. I’m sure you’re busy enough with your patient.’

‘Yes, of course.’

He waited for a moment, wondering if she would say anything else, but she simply looked back at him, very serious.

‘The boys will be here for a little while so if you think of anything else, just let them know.’

‘Thank you.’

She turned and started to busy herself taking tins out of a cupboard. Henri watched her for a moment, the muscles of her arms flickering under the skin as she moved. He let himself out.

He stood in the drizzle, watching Thierry and his younger brother, Rémy, working in the distance. He let his vision blur a little, trying to imagine they were the young men he had seen so many times here in the past. Marc Lanvier, Jean-Christophe, Thibault. But the Rossignol of his childhood was a place of sunshine and heat; he found it difficult to reconcile that with the grey scene in front of him.

‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours, okay?’ he called out, and they turned and called back, faces small in their hooded jackets. He walked back to the truck quickly, and thought about the nurse as he started the engine and drove out. The place was so cut off, Jérôme so difficult, and she so young. He couldn’t imagine what she was doing here.

‘Who was here?’

Marguerite placed a slice of the lemon tart by Jérôme’s bed, and he stared at it.

‘What’s that?’

‘Lemon tart.’

‘It looks vile.’

‘You don’t have to eat it.’

He picked at it with his fingers, tasted it with a laboured show of reluctance. ‘Who was here?’

‘When?’

‘You know when. I heard a man’s voice. I heard you talking to a man.’

She remained silent, took his free arm to take his blood pressure. She always enjoyed the puffing sound of the pump. It reminded her of blowing up balloons.

‘Well?’ he snapped.

‘Monsieur Brochon came here.’

‘Henri! He was in the house!’ Jérôme smiled, his mouth full of tart, and she watched him carefully. It was the first time she’d seen him look somewhere near happy, even fond. ‘A great man. Why didn’t you send him in?’

‘He didn’t ask.’

‘Well, that’s because he will have presumed I was resting. Next time, send him in. This is my house, you know.’

‘I know.’

He eyed her as he chewed. ‘Handsome man, Henri, isn’t he?’

She turned to put the cuff and pump away. ‘Your blood pressure’s a little high today,’ she said.

‘Isn’t he?’

‘I didn’t notice.’

‘You must have noticed.’

She took the empty plate from him, brushing crumbs of pastry from his belly onto it.

‘So the tart wasn’t quite so vile,’ she said and he scowled.

‘Disgusting,’ he said. ‘Far too sweet.’

She rolled her eyes as she walked out of the room.