Marina Kemp - Nightingale

‘You bloody fool. Get a grip.’

He kissed her head and took it in his hands, turning it so that she was facing out of the doorway, out to the fields. She stared out obediently, not turning even when he loaded the gun. Her cheeks sagged like old elastic; she nodded a little, reflexively. He cocked the gun, took the barrels to her head and pulled the trigger. She dropped in an instant, heavy as concrete. He didn’t look at the ground. A fine mist of warm blood settled over his face.

He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, pressed until it hurt. Then he wiped his face with his sleeves and strode from the pen, passing Thierry as he made for the house.

‘Call the knackerman to come and get rid of that,’ he said, gesturing behind him. He didn’t look at him, or the cows, or down at the blood he imagined must cover his body. He sensed a silent terror around him, suffusing the pre-twilight air. Everything was silent. Even the cicadas stopped suddenly, for just one second.

Brigitte set his dinner in front of him: lamb and potatoes, and a tall glass of water.

‘Busy day?’ she asked, but he didn’t respond. ‘I’ve finished the feed orders for the pigs and chickens. I found a new merchant, we’ll be saving a couple of hundred euros a year.’

‘That’s great,’ Henri said, getting up from the table to get another beer from the fridge. She watched him, glanced down at the bottle in his hand as he opened it. ‘Three beers isn’t very much, Brigitte.’

‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘Good.’ He sat down and took a long draught straight from the bottle. She didn’t like that but he knew she wouldn’t say anything. Ordinarily, she might tease him – ‘farmer by name, farmer by manners’ – but he knew that she knew not to do that tonight. He almost wanted her to try.

They sat in silence for a while as she started to eat. When Brigitte felt uncomfortable, she affected a daintiness as she ate that annoyed him. As if the bald eagerness of her darting fork could be mitigated by the small volume of food she picked up each time; or this rare show of delicacy, the repeated wipes of her napkin to each corner of her lips, make her appear less greedy.

‘How’s Paul’s shoulder?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know, he was in Montpellier today.’

‘Well I do hope he’s seen a physio.’ He could hear the moistness of her chewing. ‘I wonder how Thierry’s mother is.’

‘Why?’

‘Because she’s been ill.’

‘What, with a cold or something.’

‘Not a cold, Henri. She’s had scarlet fever.’

‘Scarlet fever?’ He leant back and let his chair tip backwards, which he knew she hated. ‘What is this, the nineteenth century?’

She frowned; she became embarrassed when he brought up any period of history she couldn’t remember from school. As far as he could tell, that left them with only the most superficial smattering of the Revolution to discuss with any ease.

‘Well that’s what it was,’ she said. ‘Laure says she’s been awfully ill. I did mean to go round there with some things but you know how busy it’s been these last few days.’

‘Why any busier than usual?’

Brigitte put down her fork and let out a little sigh. ‘I’ve been going through all the re-orders, Henri! It’s taken a long time. I’ve done them all, we’re up to date.’

Henri shrugged, took a mouthful of potato and washed it down with beer. He didn’t often drink more than one beer and he felt a little drunk already. He let his chair tip back again.

Brigitte took refuge in her food. ‘I’ll take her something tomorrow if I get a chance.’

‘I’m sure she’s fine. Maybe it’s a good thing; she might have lost a bit of weight at last.’

‘Henri!’ cried Brigitte immediately, and she looked hurt. Now he had a rise, he regretted his callousness. It was too easy.

‘That wasn’t kind,’ he said, trying to smile. ‘I take it back.’

‘I should jolly well think so,’ she said, and he was freshly irritated.

‘But it’s true. She’s grossly overweight.’ He stood up, pushing his plate away.

She stared, eyes wider than usual. ‘Won’t you eat?’ she asked.

‘I’m not hungry.’ Half-drunk bottle in his hand, he crossed the room.

‘Where are you going?’

‘For a drive,’ he said.

‘At this time? Whatever for?’

‘I feel like it.’

‘Henri!’ she cried again, and looked down, her lips pursed tight. ‘All right. Of course. Well, I’ll leave your food out, okay? I’ll wrap it up so Jojo doesn’t eat it. You can have it in a little bit. You must need it.’

‘Maybe.’

He walked to the truck, pushing aside Jojo as she tried to come with him. He could feel great walls of inevitability closing in on every side, almost tangible. He tried to resist for a moment, considered turning back towards the house. But then he imagined the night ahead of him, sitting downstairs until he knew Brigitte was asleep, crawling into their bed next to her slack snores. That was too dismal, and his hunger too deep.

It took twenty minutes to drive to Edgar’s – usually enough time for Henri to question his decision at least three times, but not tonight. As he drove, his third beer and the cool air rushing through the windows made his head light and calm. No more indecision, and no more rage.

He pulled up a little way down the track from Edgar’s cottage. The cottage itself was small, tucked away in woodland, and he was able to leave his truck away from the road. There were no cars in the driveway, no guests. Classical music blasted through the kitchen windows: opera, a man’s thick baritone, infinitely sad. Henri stood for a moment looking up at the sky, a few stars showing through gaps in the clouds. Then he shook his head and walked to the door and knocked.

Edgar smiled when he opened the door, his eyes only half open, lazy, seductive.

‘I’ve been wondering when you’d come,’ he said. He reached out for Henri’s waist; Henri tensed his abdominals under Edgar’s touch. They kissed. ‘Are you going to sit and keep me company for a while, or is this one of your hit and runs?’ he said into Henri’s ear. Henri groaned, pushing Edgar into the house. He felt sick, and aroused, and relieved.

He lay on the sofa while Edgar sat next to his head, running a hand through Henri’s hair. He remembered washing Vanille’s blood from it just a few hours earlier, how sticky it had been.

‘How’s farm life?’ Edgar asked.

‘Fine,’ said Henri. He didn’t want to talk. ‘How’s writing life?’

‘Wonderful. I’m eighty pages in and it’s flying along. But now you’ve shown up I’m naturally bound to get lovesick and stop being able to write anything but sonnets. And the world has enough of those.’

Henri turned his head sharply to remove Edgar’s hand. ‘Can you get me a drink?’

‘All the vices are coming out tonight,’ he said in the smiling voice Henri couldn’t stand. Edgar walked to the kitchen and Henri sat up, flattening his hair down, stroking it firmly into its usual parting. He stared at the coffee table in front of him, covered in books and used cups and glasses. He picked up the book at the top of the pile: Literary Impressionism in Conrad and Ford . He flicked through the pages, but could no longer make much sense of the bald, un-accented striations of English on each page. Nor could he remember what Conrad had written, whether he was English or American. His knowledge had receded like Edgar’s hairline, eroded under the great seasonal tide of the farming year.

But it was books that had first got them talking, ten or eleven or twelve years ago now, at drinks after a christening ceremony in the village. It was shortly after Edgar had moved there, and for the first hour or so Henri avoided this stranger everyone referred to as an ‘eccentric’. ‘Pretentious ass,’ he whispered to Brigitte when they were first introduced. But then over drinks they began talking, Edgar telling him offhand, as if Henri wouldn’t know the first thing about it, that he was attempting a biography of Molière. He had been visibly surprised when Henri reeled off lines of Le Malade imaginaire . They went on to discuss Racine, who’d been Henri’s favourite at school, and it was enlivening to summon his past knowledge, talk to someone who shared it, let their talk meander down unpractised routes. With everyone else, each conversation was simply a replay of the last.