Marina Kemp - Nightingale

As the afternoon went on – a violently hot afternoon in mid-August, just before a mistral came and swept summer’s intensity away – he felt Edgar’s eyes on him, interested and appraising, and felt himself stand taller, hold his jaw more firmly. He left the party reluctantly, to Brigitte’s bemusement, since he was usually the one to drag them away from social events. And he drove home drunk, tingling throughout his body, excited and fearful and alive.

Now he was sitting before a stack of books on modernist theory, the Molière project abandoned many years since. Edgar placed a bottle of Chablis and two empty glasses on the table.

‘Actually, I should go,’ he said, standing quickly to stop Edgar trying to hold him back.

‘Would it have been different if I’d brought a Sauvignon?’ Edgar asked with a smile, and Henri ignored him. In a drier tone he said, ‘And with that, Hurricane Henri sweeps off to other shores, oblivious to the wreckage he leaves in his wake.’

‘I left the dog in the car,’ he lied, and let Edgar kiss him. Then he left, walking as quickly as possible to the truck.

When he got back to the farm, the house was unlit except for the kitchen. He walked in and saw his uneaten dinner on the side, covered neatly in cling film, with a little note beside it in Brigitte’s young-looking hand: ‘Enjoy yourself!’ He closed his eyes, bowed his head as he leant against the counter. He imagined her writing it, cleaning everything away, thinking before choosing those words. Then walking heavily up to their bed, folding her clothes, moving her large, soft body around their room. Falling asleep alone while her husband ejaculated in someone’s mouth. A man’s mouth.

He couldn’t eat, but he scraped the food into a plastic bag and tucked it towards the bottom of the bin, underneath the rest of the rubbish. Then he walked upstairs slowly, wearily, and crept into the room and lay down beside Brigitte. She wasn’t snoring, had clearly not been asleep.

‘Is everything all right? What time is it?’

‘It’s midnight,’ he said. ‘Everything’s fine, my darling. You can go to sleep.’

‘Did you eat your lamb?’

‘It was delicious,’ he said, as quietly and gently as if talking to a tired child.

She didn’t reach out for him; she never did. After their first abortive attempts at love-making, when they first married – he twisted his face at the memory of her great pink thighs straddling his hips, the fumbling of her hand around his retracted penis – she had barely grumbled or complained about the largely sexless partnership they maintained. There was the odd time, still, perhaps two or three times a year: in the total dark of night, thankfully free from foreplay or words, when he was driven by privation to indiscriminate urgency. But physical intimacy beyond the most purely anatomical was something she had had to learn to do without.

He wanted to turn to her now, stroke her hair or say something kind, but he felt too deadened, too heavy even to reach out his hand. He lay on his back, apart from her, staring into the darkness.

Marguerite turned her bedside lamp on and sat up in bed, blinking. She hugged her knees to her chest and listened. There was a toad’s high rattle like a burglar alarm outside her window; it reminded her of summer childhoods by lakes, where she and Cassandre had been wimps in the face of all the insects and creatures, however hard they’d pretended to be intrepid.

She rested her left cheek on her knees, studying her little room. The broken chair, the empty suitcase under the wardrobe. The tired rug stretched out on the floor.

She had switched the light on to try to escape a constant showreel of memories and images playing in her mind’s eye as she lay trying to sleep – as if the light might force them to scatter, like launching a floodlight on a pack of thieves. But the position she was sitting in now – knees to chest, face on knees, ears pricked, bedside lamp on – was too familiar for forgetting. She had sat exactly like this so many times that it almost felt as familiar to her as sleep.

She closed her eyes, the light glowing pink through her eyelids, and let herself slide back into one of the nights before everything changed. She pictured herself from the outside: a fourteen-year-old sitting up in the pristinely elegant cream bedroom her mother had designed for her. The wallpaper was feathered with very slightly raised, pale green swirls. She wasn’t allowed to pin or tack things onto the wall so she tried to rebel by covering the bedside table with neon-framed photographs of her and her friends on school trips or at birthday parties. Hiding cigarettes behind their backs, so that the innocuous photos held a secret challenge. She used to hang dream-catchers and strings of gaudy beads from the polished bedposts; aged ten, Cassandre had already started to imitate this but she couldn’t quite get it right. With plastic pony charms and hearts, her arrangements looked too young. If only Marguerite had just given her some of her own.

The night their mother first left them was one of those nights: Marguerite was sitting up listening to her parents arguing. She was used to it by then; she spoke to her best friend Adeline about it sometimes in quiet corners at school, drawing her face in and making it sound much more dramatic than it was. ‘I worry for their lives, sometimes,’ she’d say, but that was dazzlingly untrue: her father would never have raised a hand against her mother, nor her mother – tiny and skinny, her meticulously sculpted arms weak – against him. Indeed, their lack of physical contact seemed to constitute a great part of the complaints they routinely filed against each other during the day. At night, on the other hand, specific words were hard to make out through the muffler of the bedroom walls; theirs was an amorphous volley of snarling, parodying, occasional bellowing. It was a tidal swell of rage, it came and went through the night, and Marguerite stayed up to listen, mostly for Cassandre’s sake. Four years younger, she was not yet sophisticated enough to hear the fights without fear and distress.

Inevitably the door handle would swivel slowly and Cassandre would appear with her little helmet of dark hair ruffled from sleep. She’d stand in the doorway until Marguerite beckoned her in. She had a beautiful face before everything changed; surely it was not just through the prism of an older sister’s pride that Marguerite thought that. It was tidy and pointed and neat, her skin a bit darker than Marguerite’s, her lips a very perfect bow.

She’d get under the covers at the foot of Marguerite’s bed and ask her to sing. Until recently, Marguerite had always sung when Cassandre asked. Usually it was a little ditty she had invented, chronicling the adventures of two unlikely friends: a chimp, blundering yet grandiose, and a nightingale. She improvised the words each time, inventing a new adventure for the pair. Cassandre would join in when the chorus came.

But Cassandre hadn’t yet left école primaire , whereas Marguerite was already coming to the end of collège , starting soon at the lycée ; she had kissed two boys, she’d smoked cigarettes and tried vodka, she had recently got her period and bought a white bra that she filled carefully with folded tissue. Things were different; she would still defend Cassandre to the death but she no longer sang willingly whenever asked. As a result, Cass had taken to begging, which annoyed Marguerite.

‘The Chimp and the Nightingale, Margo?’ she asked.

‘Not tonight, Cass.’ But because she looked sad, Marguerite added: ‘I’ll sing to you tomorrow. I’ve just had a really long day: double maths in the morning and double Latin in the afternoon, and I have to get up early to finish extra homework from Madame Garcia because she’s a complete bitch.’