Marina Kemp - Nightingale

She brought him bread and jam to eat, and sweet tea. The room smelt rancid from his morning of sickness, and she cleaned it as he ate.

‘I’m glad you’ve got an appetite,’ she said and he nodded, opening his mouth to take a bite. Some jam dripped off the bread and onto his chest, but he didn’t notice. There was a crumb fastened in the corner of his mouth. These things felt unbearably sad to her then; she came forward to wipe the jam away with a tissue, and he frowned.

‘You’re forever fussing.’

‘I’m going to change your sheets,’ she said when she’d taken his tray, and he nodded again. He leant into her arms as she lifted him up and they shuffled together towards the chair. It was odd, she realised, that she knew his smell more intimately than her own.

It was not until the next morning that Jérôme regained his usual strength: he had colour in his cheeks, sat upright in the bed. He was galvanised all the more by hunger; he snapped at her for food, refusing to let her clean his teeth first, and gobbled his toast loudly, flecks of spit collecting in the corners of his mouth.

‘I’d like chocolate,’ he said when he’d finished.

She smiled. ‘I don’t think we have any.’

‘Why not? Have you eaten it?’

‘We haven’t had any in the house for weeks. I didn’t know you particularly liked it.’

‘Well, don’t just presume,’ he said, his eyebrows screwed together to form a deep, fleshy crease between them. Marguerite noticed that a couple of the coarse white eyebrow hairs had grown long beyond the others, indeed beyond proportion; they strayed up towards his hairline, as if trying to replace the hair that had been lost there.

‘What are you looking at?’

‘Nothing.’ She filled his glass from the jug, gave it to him. ‘You must stay well hydrated today.’

But he pushed the glass away, and stared in front of him. ‘Get me something else to eat. And I don’t mean more bread, I’m sick to death of bread.’

As Marguerite walked through to the kitchen, she realised she was pleased by his bad temper, signifying as it did his return to relative health. She took raisin biscuits from a tin and arranged them on a plate to bring back to him, but when she re-entered his room and set the plate down on his bedside table he didn’t even register them.

‘I heard a voice here yesterday.’

‘When?’

‘You know when, come on. I’ve just remembered, I heard talking when I was drifting in and out of sleep. Yesterday. Come on, I’m not stupid.’

‘Of course not.’

‘Who was it? Was someone coming to see me?’

‘No,’ she said, and she saw something slacken in his face. A ripple passed over his forehead, around his eyes and mouth. His shoulders dropped. He stared down the bed for a moment, unfocused.

‘It was a woman from the village,’ she said, for the sake of saying something.

‘Name?’ he asked.

‘She’s called Suki.’

‘Suki Lacourse,’ he said immediately, his interest rekindled. ‘Arab, married to Philippe Lacourse. He’s a prime cretin. Why in God’s name was she here?’

‘Iranian. She just passed by.’

‘How do you know her?’

‘I’ve met her a few times in the village.’

‘So you’re socialising, are you? How nice for you.’

‘I’m not socialising.’

‘You could have fooled me.’

‘I spend every moment in an empty house with you.’

‘Henri Brochon was here last week. Suki Lacourse is dropping by on social visits. What next? I’m going to wake up to a party at the end of my bed.’

She couldn’t help smiling, then, because it was too ridiculous. He smiled too, unexpectedly; it was a wry smile, a little sheepish.

‘So you refuse to tell me why that woman was visiting the house. What could you possibly have to do with someone like that? She’s old enough to be your mother.’

‘She’s not even forty,’ she said. ‘And anyway, she had a favour to ask.’

He frowned. ‘I’d watch out for her, if I were you.’

‘Why?’

‘She’s trouble.’

‘Why do you think that?’

‘She’s – different.’

‘You mean foreign.’

He looked at her with irritation. ‘No. She makes trouble because she’s never adapted to her environment.’

‘Has her environment adapted to her?’

‘Of course not. Why should it?’

Marguerite shook her head. She didn’t have the energy.

‘You think I’m talking about her being a Muslim, but I’m not. I’m talking about her aspirations. She’s lived here, what, twenty years? But she hasn’t accepted anything. She doesn’t accept that she’s married to a boring man, living in a boring house in a boring village, and that ultimately, for all her exoticism, she’s pretty damn boring herself.’ He licked his lips and paused. ‘You may not think I know much, but I do know that people who don’t adjust their expectations cause trouble.’

Marguerite said nothing, and Jérôme smiled again. ‘You, for example,’ he said, his tone gentler, ‘have quashed all your expectations, all your aspirations, and therefore you’re no trouble at all.’

She saw, with some shock, that he wasn’t needling – that he didn’t expect this to offend her at all. But his words caused instant, tangible pain. She felt anger rising up inside her, a rush of it.

‘Thank you for your armchair analysis, but you know absolutely nothing about my life.’

‘I was joking with you, for God’s sake,’ he said.

‘And the only reason behind people thinking that Suki is “trouble” is bigotry.’ He tried to say something, but she interrupted. ‘Of course you don’t adapt to a place if you’re treated like an outsider from beginning to end, and you’re left out of things, whatever you do.’

She was inarticulate in her anger; he swiped the air calmly, dismissing her words. ‘Let me tell you, Marguerite,’ he said, ‘the delusion of centrality and the self-doubt involved in feeling left out translate into one’s behaviour, one’s words, even one’s body language. All of that renders a person sufficiently unattractive to company that they end up actually being left out. It’s circular, it fulfils itself.’

He looked up at the ceiling and licked his lips again, satisfied; she imagined clearly how he would have behaved as the boss of his company, how staggeringly arrogant he must have been before old age started to degrade him.

‘Thank you for the lecture,’ she said, instantly regretting those words. They played themselves back in her mind, immature and empty. He laughed to himself, reaching for a biscuit.

‘Silly girl. I found another weak spot.’

She left the room and walked straight through the kitchen, past the stupid little clusters of flowers she’d been arranging. She kicked the door open, swearing, and stopped outside, hot tears starting in her eyes.

She heard a sound, then, nearby, and sensed the men’s presence before she saw them. Henri Brochon and his farmhands, lugging the trunk of the ailing oak towards the driveway. So it was finally dead. They looked away, embarrassed for her, and she didn’t even try to acknowledge them or gather herself. She walked back into the kitchen with her head down and went straight upstairs to her bedroom, burying her face in the pillow until the humiliation receded, dream and reality becoming fused.

Brigitte had a special way of folding sheets and tablecloths. She’d invented it herself, when she was around fourteen. She didn’t like to teach it, in case someone might show someone else and pass it off as their own. That would annoy her, not because she wanted glory but because she couldn’t stand anything that wasn’t fair.

On the other hand, she had to admit she liked people to see her do it. It was very fast, very effective. She held the two corners at diagonals from each other, and through a series of wrist flicks the entire sheet ended up lying flat, in a diagonal half, on the table in front of her. It could then, with just two further folds, end up as a tidy square of fabric. Fold it once again and it would fit perfectly on a shelf: a slim, flat, unrumpled rectangle.